Asciidoctor
Shares rank 6 of 8 document parsers by recommenders
Mature, free tool for writing documentation and books in AsciiDoc, with many output formats. Some find it involves compromises and a Ruby dependency.
Mature, free tool for writing documentation and books in AsciiDoc, with many output formats. Some find it involves compromises and a Ruby dependency.
8 people gave an opinion
- recommend it
- 7
- criticize it
- 1
- approval share
- 88%
Recommended in 4 of 13 months
- November 2025: recommended
- December 2025: not recommended
- January 2026: recommended
- February 2026: not recommended
- March 2026: not recommended
- April 2026: not recommended
- May 2026: recommended
- June 2026: not recommended
- July 2026: not recommended
- August 2026: not recommended
- September 2026: recommended
- October 2026: not recommended
- November 2026: not recommended (month in progress)
Why it doesn’t carry the badge
- 7 people recommend itNeeds 10 or more, not met.
- 7 recommenders for every criticNeeds 2 to 1 or better, met.
- Recommended in 4 of 13 monthsNeeds 4 or more, met.
The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works
What people say about it
The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.
Why people recommend it
Each mark is one comment
Mature and battle-tested with many outputs
“the overengineering doesn't even solve problems better than the vanilla solutions out there like AsciiDoctor and Sphinx”
Comment from 14 Jan 2026 in “You Don't Need Mintlify” “it's quite old, it's battle-tested, and offers me many options to produce various forms of output”
Comment from 4 Nov 2025 in “Ask HN: What are you using for blogging?” Strong for documentation suites and books
“Nothing comes close to Asciidoc(tor) for a complete documentation suite.”
Comment from 4 Nov 2025 in “Writing an Asciidoc Parser in Rust: Asciidocr” “I enjoyed using Asciidoctor to write a book.”
Comment from 27 May 2026 in “I Bypassed Adobe and Microsoft to Build a Git-Tracked Book Production Pipeline”
What people warn about
Each mark is one comment
Involves some compromises
“Asciidoctor worked for this, although there were some compromises”
Comment from 23 Nov 2025 in “Markdown is holding you back”
Other document parsers people recommend
The four most recommended other document parsers, with the same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.
| Product | Recommend | Criticize | Approval | Months | Owned | Badge |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Pandoc | 142 | 28 | 84% | 13 | 10 yrs6 owners | Approved |
| Tesseract OCR | 32 | 28 | 53% | 12 | — | — |
| Docling | 19 | 4 | 83% | 10 | — | Approved |
| Mozilla Readability | 10 | 1 | 91% | 6 | — | Approved |
| AsciidoctorThis page | 7 | 1 | 88% | 4 | — | — |
What people said
All 9 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.
“I guess I could do it with AI now but still”
“I enjoyed using Asciidoctor to write a book.”
“the overengineering doesn't even solve problems better than the vanilla solutions out there like AsciiDoctor and Sphinx”
“lets you put any content at all in a cell”
“I do not like AsciiDoctor, but it's just because I hate introducing Ruby dependencies.”
“Asciidoctor worked for this, although there were some compromises”
“Chat bots aren't designed to make PDFs. They are just trying to use tools in the background, probably starting with markdown.”
“it's quite old, it's battle-tested, and offers me many options to produce various forms of output”
“Nothing comes close to Asciidoc(tor) for a complete documentation suite.”
Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.