When comparing DocBook vs AsciiDoc, the Slant community recommends AsciiDoc for most people. In the question“What are the best markup languages?” AsciiDoc is ranked 4th while DocBook is ranked 13th. The most important reason people chose AsciiDoc is:
The formatting of Asciidoc is standardized so there is only one 'flavor' unlike in Markdown. The definitive user guide is [here](http://asciidoctor.org/docs/asciidoc-writers-guide/).
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Pros
Pro Powerful and possessing a very rich vocabulary
Pro XSL stylesheets
Can produce good-looking output in PDF, HTML or ePub through the use of the Docbook XSL stylesheets, which are not difficult to customize.
Pro Easy to extend
Pro Standardized format
The formatting of Asciidoc is standardized so there is only one 'flavor' unlike in Markdown. The definitive user guide is here.
Pro Human-readable
Simple, easy-to-read style similar to Markdown. Designed to be easy for a human to enter with a simple text editor, and easy to read in its raw form.
Pro Technical Documentation
The DocBook format which Asciidoctor can convert to was originally developed with the creation of computer books in mind and thus has a rich array of formatting options which are powerful enough to manage the formatting of lengthy technical books.
Pro Supported by GitHub and GitLab
Both GitHub and GitLab support AsciiDoc syntax in repositories, wikis and Gists/Snippets (powered by the Asciidoctor Ruby gem).
Pro It's structured
Cleanly transforms to DocBook and HTML5.
Pro Supports semantic markup
Pro Native support for colored output
AsciiDoc has offered the ability to define both the color of any text output as well as its background, almost since its inception. It accepts several standard chromatic notations for them, too, including hexadecimal and decimal RGB values, decimal HSL and named CSS.
Pro Embedded metadata
The AsciiDoc standard defines a number of metadata values which can be defined inside a document primarily for contextual purposes that aren't rendered in its standard output such as author, date, license, document title and version, etc. These can be especially useful when searching through a large number of files/documents or documenting the evolution of one as part of a larger codebase.
Pro Shorter, more concise than Markdown
Pro Good tool support
There are plugins to support editing AsciiDoc for many editors/IDEs.
Cons
Con Hard to learn
Because of its complexity and large vocabulary and complicated toolchain, it is hard to learn.
Con Not as popular/widely used as Markdown
The Asciidoc format is not as popular/widely used as Markdown. Notwithstanding the foregoing, Asciidoc is used for some of the following projects:
- O'Reilly and Maker Press
- NFJS, the magazine
- other examples
Con Limited output options
Asciidoctor can only convert directly to HTML or DocBook. However, you can always use another converter such as pandoc to convert from one of the output formats to another format.