AsciiDoc Usage 

Usage 

work on file 
asciidoc /usr/share/doc/asciidoc/article.txt
-n, --section-numbers
       Auto-number HTML article section titles. Synonym for -a
       numbered.
work on pipe 

asciidoc(1) can be used as a filter, so you can pipe chunks of text through it. For example:

$ echo 'Hello *World!*' | asciidoc -s -
<p>Hello <strong>World!</strong></p>

The -s (-no-header-footer) command-line option suppresses header and footer output and is useful if the processed output is to be included in another file.

Quick Help 

To print a help topic specify the topic name as a command argument. Examples:

$ asciidoc --help=manpage
$ asciidoc --help=syntax

The asciidoc(1) -v (-verbose) command-line option displays the order of configuration file loading and warns of potential configuration file problems.

Detail Help 

asciidoc [OPTIONS] FILE

OPTIONS

-a ATTRIBUTE, --attribute=ATTRIBUTE
       Define or delete document attribute. ATTRIBUTE is formatted
       like NAME=VALUE. Alternate acceptable forms are NAME (the VALUE
       defaults to an empty string) and NAME! (delete the NAME
       attribute). Values containing spaces should be enclosed in
       double-quote characters.
-b BACKEND, --backend=BACKEND
       Backend output file format: docbook, xhtml11 or html4. Defaults
       to xhtml11.
-f CONF_FILE, --conf-file=CONF_FILE
       Use configuration file CONF_FILE.
-d DOCTYPE, --doctype=DOCTYPE
       Document type: article, manpage or book. The book document type
       is only supported by the docbook backend. Default document type
       is article.
-c, --dump-conf
       Dump configuration to stdout.
-e, --no-conf
       Exclude implicitly loaded configuration files except for those
       named like the input file (infile.conf and
       infile-backend.conf).
-s, --no-header-footer
       Suppress document header and footer output.
-o OUT_FILE, --out-file=OUT_FILE
       Write output to file OUT_FILE. Defaults to the base name of
       input file with backend extension. If the input is stdin then
       the outfile defaults to stdout. If OUT_FILE is - then the
       standard output is used.
-n, --section-numbers
       Auto-number HTML article section titles. Synonym for -a
       numbered.
-v, --verbose
       Verbosely print processing information and configuration file
       checks to stderr.
-h [TOPIC], --help[=TOPIC]
       Print help TOPIC. --help topics will print a list of help
       topics, --help syntax summarises AsciiDoc syntax, --help
       manpage prints the AsciiDoc manpage.
--version
       Print program version number.

How AsciiDoc is used officially 

How AsciiDoc web site is built 

/usr/share/doc/asciidoc/examples/website/README-website.txt

The AsciiDoc website source is included in the AsciiDoc distribution (in ./examples/website/) as an example of using AsciiDoc to build a website.

A simple shell script (./examples/website/build-website.sh) will build the site's web pages — just set the LAYOUT variable to the desired layout.

File: The build-website.sh file
#!/bin/sh

VERS="7.1.0"
DATE="2006-01-13"

# Leave the desired layout uncommented.
LAYOUT=layout1          # Tables based layout.
#LAYOUT=layout2         # CSS based simulated frames layout.

ASCIIDOC_HTML="python ../../asciidoc.py --unsafe --backend=xhtml11 \
--conf-file=${LAYOUT}.conf --attribute icons \
--attribute iconsdir=./images/icons --attribute=badges \
--attribute=revision=$VERS  --attribute=date=$DATE"

$ASCIIDOC_HTML --attribute=index-only index.txt
$ASCIIDOC_HTML --attribute=numbered userguide.txt
$ASCIIDOC_HTML --doctype=manpage manpage.txt
$ASCIIDOC_HTML downloads.txt
$ASCIIDOC_HTML README.txt
$ASCIIDOC_HTML CHANGELOG.txt
$ASCIIDOC_HTML README-website.txt
$ASCIIDOC_HTML a2x.1.txt

How AsciiDoc user guide is generated 

You might have noticed that the distributed documentation files (for example ./doc/asciidoc.html) are not produced directly using the xhtml11 approach. They are produced using the DocBook backend. Moreover, they are not the plain outputs produced using default DocBook XSL Stylesheets configuration, because they have been processed using customized DocBook XSL Stylesheet drivers along with (in the case of HTML outputs) the custom ./stylesheets/docbook.css CSS stylesheet.

If you want to see how the complete documentation set is processed take a look at the A-A-P script ./doc/main.aap.

Basically, the user guide is first converted to a DocBook XML file, then to a single XHTML file:

$ asciidoc -b docbook asciidoc.txt
$ xsltproc --nonet --stringparam html.stylesheet ./docbook-xsl.css \
  ../docbook-xsl/xhtml.xsl asciidoc.xml > asciidoc.html

If using a DocBook XML toolchain is a big hurdles for your, a2x(1) can help — it's toolchain wrapper command that will generate XHTML (chunked and unchunked), PDF, man page, HTML Help and text file outputs from an AsciiDoc text file. a2x(1) does all the grunt work associated with generating and sequencing the toolchain commands and managing intermediate and output files. a2x(1) also optionally deploys admonition and navigation icons and a CSS stylesheet.