I really don't see the relationship other than using '=' to indicate a heading, and that's it, other types of block use a total different syntax. AsciiDoc (the language) was first implemented in Python a loooong time ago and mostly abandoned by it's creator, later on the Ruby implementation appeared and with it Asciidoctor, the render engine.Tels wrote:AsciiDoctor seems like someone re-invented pod (perlpod) in Ruby. So, maybe nice if you already use Ruby, otherwise it just seems to bring in a lot of new dependencies (ruby!) for little gain.
It is true that it introduces the Ruby dependency, but many programs today depend on many tools and languages. Setting a self-contained environment with a Ruby machine and the proper library ('gem' in ruby terminology) in Linux/MacOs is trivial and takes 3 commands (true! check rvm). Doing so for instance in TravisCI is trivial, this allows to render a page on every PullRequest in github.
Asciidoctor is very popular in the Java community and is used in some important projects, and most people don't even know it runs on Ruby because it uses the jRuby engine to run, there's even a JavaScript implementation for those that prefer that too. This live demo uses that https://asciidoclive.com/edit/scratch/1.
If someone still things is similar to tools like perlpod, just check the quick reference http://asciidoctor.org/docs/asciidoc-sy ... reference/, or the full manual http://asciidoctor.org/docs/user-manual/. Only the length of features is enough to see is no simple tool to just do simple tech documents.
Lastly, editors like Manning or O'Reilly allow to use it, and the Linux Kernel documentation is moving also into using it.
Apologies for the ad.
TL;RD;
It's nothing like perlpod, lots of other features and you don't need to worry about Ruby because it's a)trivial to install or you can use Java or javascript.