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                 AppBITS: adoc Studio Eases AsciiDoc Publishing

   Adam Engst

   Having spent 10 years writing tech books and another 14 publishing Take
   Control Books, I'm a sucker for publishing systems. Even though I no
   longer create long, structured documents, I couldn't resist checking
   out [1]adoc Studio, a new Mac, iPad, and iPhone app from
   [2]ProjectWizards, the German company behind the powerful project
   management app [3]Merlin Project. (When we met CEO Frank Blome'see
   '[4]Three Highlights from MacTech Conference 2015,' 9 November 2015'I
   lamented to him that our son hadn't been taught anything about project
   management in school, only to learn that it's was part of the primary
   school curriculum in Germany. Of course it is)

   adoc Studio is an environment for creating and previewing text written
   in [5]AsciiDoc, a plain text markup language aimed at technical
   content. AsciiDoc is extremely similar to Markdown but focuses more on
   the semantic elements of a text'items like headings, sidebars,
   blockquotes, references, admonitions, equations, and comments. It also
   boasts powerful features for modularizing and reusing text with
   includes, conditionals, substitutions, and passthroughs. Although you
   can create AsciiDoc in any text editor, manage it with any version
   control system, and publish to many output formats, it generally
   requires installing, maintaining, and interacting with command-line
   tools.

   The genesis of adoc Studio came from ProjectWizards' desire to write
   AsciiDoc on the iPad, which doesn't interact well with the command
   line. The main adoc Studio window shows a sidebar listing files in
   play, a text composition pane where you write AsciiDoc, and a preview
   pane showing the formatted version. The adoc Coach helps you insert
   complex AsciiDoc blocks'for instance, adding an image requires a
   filename and takes options for size and alignment. The app also
   identifies and helps you correct syntax errors. Use the sidebar when
   you're creating and working with composite documents, such as the
   chapters of a book, and adoc Studio simplifies tasks like making
   references to elements elsewhere in the same document or within other
   documents in the project. It can export HTML and PDF, each with
   multiple attributes that pull in the appropriate data. For instance,
   you could publish a manual for an app that runs on the Mac, iPad, and
   iPhone, each with the appropriate screenshots for its platform.

   All this is overkill for most small works, but for serious technical
   publishing projects that could benefit from the capabilities of
   AsciiDoc, adoc Studio makes the process far more approachable and
   faster for those who don't already spend their lives on the command
   line. adoc Studio costs $9.99 per month or $99.99 per year for all
   three versions.

References

   Visible links
   1. https://www.adoc-studio.app/
   2. https://www.projectwizards.net/en
   3. https://www.projectwizards.net/en/merlin-project
   4. https://tidbits.com/2015/11/09/three-highlights-from-mactech-conference-2015/
   5. https://asciidoc.org/

   Hidden links:
   6. https://tidbits.com/wp/../uploads/2024/09/adoc-Studio.jpg

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