AsciiDoc is a human-readable document format, semantically equivalent to DocBook XML, but using plain-text mark-up conventions.

AsciiDoc documents can be created using any text editor and read “as-is”, or rendered to HTML or any other format supported by a DocBook tool-chain, i.e. PDF, TeX, Unix manpages, e-books, slide presentations, etc.

[4][5] AsciiDoc was created in 2002 by Stuart Rackham, who published tools (‘asciidoc’ and ‘a2x’), written in the Python programming language to convert plain-text, ‘human readable’ files to commonly used published document formats.

[3] A Ruby implementation called ‘Asciidoctor’, released in 2013, is in use by GitHub[6] and GitLab.

Some of O'Reilly Media's books and e-books are authored using AsciiDoc mark-up.