Working with complex documents
Markdown is great for short, simple documents – it was designed for publishing to the web. However, issues may arise when trying to create more complex documents.
For academic writing and more complex documents, AsciiDoc may be a better choice. This format is superficially very similar to Markdown, but includes support for footnotes, call-outs blocks, complex tables, math, embedded files, and more.
AsciiDoc is a format designed for formal publishing – for example by publishing companies like O’Reilly:
You can quickly see the difference that writing with AsciiDoc makes by looking at the examples below. These are just a sample of the kinds of complex layouts that can be created based on very minimal plain text source files with AsciiDoc markup: