GML evolved into SGML, an international standard and was adopted in specific industries where translation costs or regulation demands justified the investment in custom systems, such as aviation and pharmaceutical companies. The 1970s saw the development of two systems that influenced every system afterwards: SGML and TeX. In 1969, Charles Goldfarb developed Generalized Markup Language ( GML), which used declarative and printer-independent codes, and enabled the IBM BookMaster product, which allowed the large-scale writing and production of books. IBM felt the pain associated with early typesetting systems, which used codes specific to each printer.Ī book encoded for one printer model had to be reencoded to be printed in another printer model. IBM was one of the first companies to create large quantities of documentation for the mainframes. Semantic markup attempts to capture the intention behind the documentation, ideally in a way that is not tied to a specific output format. Therefore, it is paramount that writers can manipulate the documentation with multiple tools, and the best way is to have open formats that can easily be understood by very different tools. Word can easily be incompatible with itself.Īlso, no single tool is perfect for every job.Īny large documentation set that evolves over time will eventually need some change that just happens to be difficult in one tool, and would be easier to do with another tool, often a custom script. It's really hard for several people to work on the same long document. It really struggles with long documents that change over a long period. Word is good for 10-page reports written once by a single person. Joaquim is moving the Farfetch infrastructure to DITA, but AsciidocFX earned its place as a technical scratchpad.Įmployers always ask for Word, and cannot see the need for anything else. These flaws prevent their adoption as a backbone for serious technical writing. However, both the AsciidocFX editor and the Asciidoctor parser have their own flaws. Writers can quickly draft documents combining both text and technical diagrams. The typography is good enough to use without special configuration. AsciiDoc is readily extensible, and seamlessly incorporates PlantUML drawings, for example.ĪsciidocFX deploys everything needed to convert the text and diagrams into PDF, HTML, and ePub books. The editor AsciidocFX turns the plain text format Asciidoc into an insightful drafting tool, even if Asciidoc falls short as a production writing tool.ĪsciidocFX customizes the well-known Atom editor to handle AsciiDoc, a plain text format that is much better than Markdown but still weaker than ReStructured Text.
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