[cdwg] asciidoc

[Christopher J. Morrone]

Hi folks,

On the last CDWG call we discussed documentation a bit, and I mentioned 
the asciidoc tool.  Here is a link:

http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/

Justin asked if it could generate man pages, and I guessed that it did 
not.  Happily, I was wrong!  It does in fact support man pages as well:

http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/chunked/ch24.html

I first learned about asciidoc from the 0mq project:

http://zeromq.org/

Their documents use that, here is an example:

http://zguide.zeromq.org/page:all

Notice the diagrams.  Those are converted to SVG format from ascii art 
that is embedded right in the asciidoc document.  To perform the 
conversion they use asciitosvg:

https://bitbucket.org/dhobsd/asciitosvg

Another program with a similar ascii-art-to-graphics-format goal is call 
ditaa.  It is written in java, but its downside is that it directly 
generates png files rather than the much more desirable vector graphics 
files.

http://ditaa.sourceforge.net/

Chris