Getting help from docs and other users
This summarizes the different online forums where users of the plugin can get help from other users, and where they can discuss new ideas.
This is part of the step-by-step series to set up a technical writing environment with IntelliJ and the AsciiDoc plugin. See the page Setup for technical writing for an overview of all steps.
Use this page if one of the pages in the user guide doesn’t provide the necessary information, or to continue the learning journey of technical writing.
Documentation resources for AsciiDoc, Asciidoctor and Antora
There are different documentation sites for different topics:
- AsciiDoc Language Documentation
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This is the reference documentation for the AsciiDoc language. Find out which macros exist, how to format tables, links, lists, etc.
- Asciidoctor Documentation
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Learn about how to use the Asciidoctor implementation to convert AsciiDoc content to HTML and other formats on the command line or how to embed it into a build process.
- AsciiDoc Recommended Practices
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An opinionated list of common practices, and an explanation of the rule “One Sentence Per Line”.
- Other Asciidoctor projects
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An overview of related projects the community has built over the years.
AsciiDoc community chats on Zulip
There are different Zulip chats for different topics. Most of the content is accessible without registration, and users can search previous discussions to find answers to their questions.
Register for free and log-in to find more content, as not all channels are accessible without logging in first. Posting questions and answers requires registration and logging in as well.
The maintainers of Asciidoctor and the AsciiDoc plugin for IntelliJ are active in all three Zulip chats. Still, getting answers to new questions might take some hours or days.
- Asciidoctor Zulip Chat
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This chat covers questions and answers around Asciidoctor, the open source implementation to turn AsciiDoc content into HTML, PDF, epub, and other formats. Go to https://asciidoctor.zulipchat.com/ to join the chat, and have a look at https://asciidoctor.org/ to find out more about the project.
- Antora Zulip Chat
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This chat covers questions and answers around Antora, the open source multi-repository documentation site generator for tech writers that is based on AsciiDoc. Go to https://antora.zulipchat.com/ to join the chat, and have a look at https://antora.org/ to find out more about the project. On the website, scroll down to find a high-level summary of the project’s features. Click on Docs in the upper right corner for extensive documentation.
- AsciiDoc Zulip Chat
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The AsciiDoc Working Group at Eclipse steers the future of the AsciiDoc Language. Go to https://asciidoc.zulipchat.com/ to join the chat, and have a look at https://asciidoc.org/ and https://asciidoc-wg.ecipse.org/ to find out more about the working group’s activities.
GitHub
For questions around the plugin, to browse open issues and to join the discussion about the future roadmap, visit the GitHub issues of the IntelliJ plugin project.
To read and search the issues, no registration is required. To create issues and comments, register for a free GitHub account.
When creating a new issue, there is a category Question / Discussion for general inquiries.
The maintainers of the AsciiDoc plugin for IntelliJ read the issues. As this is a spare time project, answers might take days and sometimes more than a week.
In general, the responses are slower than in the AsciiDoc community chats on Zulip. On the other hand follow-up activities are better tracked on GitHub issues.
Write-the-Docs community
The Write The Docs community provides a website for technical writers at https://www.writethedocs.org/, organizes conferences around the world which make their recordings available free of charge, and supports the community with a publicly available Slack channel.
The Slack instance has many channels, for example #asciidoc, #static-site-generator and #docs-as-code. They might give additional insights, still the Zulip chats mentioned above seem more active and more focused on AsciiDoc content at the time of writing.
Use the chat to get answers to your questions, and help others with their questions.
Meetups (online and in-person)
The Write-the-Docs community offers local meetups. See https://www.writethedocs.org/meetups/ for a list. Join the Write-the-Docs Slack instance and watch the channel #meetups to see postings of upcoming meetings.
There’s also the Meetup Continuous Documentation Regulars which happens to be hosted by the maintainer of the AsciiDoc plugin. Expect topics around documentation as code in general, not necessarily focused on AsciiDoc only.