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Asciidoctor
:gem: A fast, open source text processor and publishing toolchain, written in Ruby, for converting AsciiDoc content to HTML 5, DocBook 5, and other formats.
I tried Pandoc, and a week spent trying to learn again that black magic called TeX was enough for me to decide that the system wasn't what I needed. My relationship with TeX/LaTeX has always been stormy: while I admire the system, the ingenuity, and the one-man show effort behind TeX, the final result is a convoluted beast that is difficult to tame. It is also terribly undocumented!
Markdown is a great format, and I used it for all my blog posts since I started writing. Pelican, which is the static site generator that I use, supports Markdown out of the box, so it was extremely easy to start using it, and overall I had an enjoyable experience.
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.