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Why do we need a language that creates a text page by compiling to JS? the same set of goals are handled by AsciiDoc. Real publishers (eg Oreilly) use AsciiDoc as their input format to create books and websites.

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I can second AsciiDoc. It hits the sweet spot between Markdown (arguably more suited for short-ish content) and LaTeX (full-blown academic papers with citations, formulas, etc.).

Have been using AsciiDoc for the past few years and loving it, only falling back to Markdown on places where AsciiDoc is not (yet?) available. GitHub and GitLab, for example, supports rendering AsciiDoc. PyPI unfortunately has not supported it, but more seem to be looking into it [1], which is great.

--- [1] https://github.com/pypa/readme_renderer/issues/205

Same.

asciidoc is my favourite too, thanks to Asciidoctor. I agree, asciidoc hits the sweet spots as a format. Been frustrated by the tooling lately though. I can see the huge effort put into Asciidoctor, and am thankful for it, but there are still big downsides i.e. no semantic html 5 output, difficult (or at least more difficult than necessary) integration with image generators, heavyweight (only ruby dependency on my entire machine). I imagine this just needs more time and resources put to it, as all these issues (except the ruby one) are open on GitHub.

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