book-template VS Asciidoctor

I've written a ~300 page book in MD using book-template [1], and I must say, it was a wonderful experience. I did 1 chapter = 1 file. It had tables, images, etc with a nice TOC along with references and appendix. All the basics for writing a book work just fine with md, I'd say.

[1] https://github.com/alessandrocucci/book-template

You have also AsciiDoctor ( https://asciidoctor.org/ ) which is alive and well. I am using it for technical CS documentation internally, but only for single page documents. I did not try to deploy their whole multi-document setup called Antora ( https://antora.org/ ).

AsciiDoc File support. ( #1876, #808, #2022)

If Maths is important to you, take a look at Asciidoc - https://asciidoctor.org/

I use Asciidoctor, highlightjs, a custom highlight.js language definition and that bash script:

AsciiDoc is so close to being good. It slam dunks Markdown, but they just have a few nagging issues that they refuse to fix, for 9 years now:

https://github.com/asciidoctor/asciidoctor/issues/1087

Asciidoctor is a Ruby-based text processor for parsing AsciiDoc into a document model and converting it to HTML5, PDF, EPUB3, and other formats. Built-in converters for HTML5, DocBook5, and man pages are available in Asciidoctor. Asciidoctor has an out-of-the-box default stylesheet and built-in integrations for MathJax (display beautiful math in your browser), highlight.js, Rouge, and Pygments (syntax highlighting), as well as Font Awesome (for icons). Although Asciidoctor is written in Ruby, that does not mean you need to know Ruby to use it. Asciidoctor can be executed on a JVM using AsciidoctorJ or in any JavaScript environment (including the browser) using Asciidoctor.js. You can choose any one of three Asciidoctor processors (Ruby, JavaScript, Java/JVM) and get the same experience. You can also use the Asciidoctor Maven Plugin to convert your Asciidoc documentation using Asciidoctor from an Apache Maven build.

asciidoctor for writing

If you're looking at AsciiDoc, you'll want to look at Asciidoctor: https://asciidoctor.org/

The third system that I found was AsciiDoc, which started as a Python project, abandoned for a while and eventually resurrected by Dan Allen with Asciidoctor. AsciiDoc has a lot of features and I consider it superior to Markdown, but Asciidoctor is a Ruby program, and this made it difficult for me to use it. In addition, the standard output of Asciidoctor is a nice single HTML page but again customising it is a pain. I eventually created the site of the book using it, but adding my Google Analytics code and a sitemap.xml to the HTML wasn't trivial, not to mention customising the look of elements such as admonitions.