Legal AsciiDoc

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Legal AsciiDoc

tbrooke
I am a lawyer and I have come to the conclusion that Word is the bane of the legal profession. I have looked at several alternatives and I have concluded that what is needed is a separation of the content and the structure of legal documents.

I have looked at latex, lawtex, markdown, legal-markdown restructuredtext and now finally Asciidoc.

Asciidoc may not be perfect for legal applications but it appears to be a standard and I believe that it could be easily adopted. Markdown seems almost universal and it's support on github is a huge asset but I just do not beieve that it supports enough in the way of formatting for legal materials.

Any thoughts on AsciiDoc for legal documents and legislation


TOm Brooke

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Re: Legal AsciiDoc

asotobu
Hi Tom, well I have used AsciiDoc for technical projects, not for lawyer documents which is a great news because it means that AsciiDoc is being spread across the globe :D.

Would you like to explain us what are your requirements to see if they fit well in AsciiDoc? If not maybe we can discuss an addition to Asciidoctor, or even create a lawyer extension (or templates) for you and other people who have similar requirements

So happy you has decided to use AsciiDoc and Asciidoctor.

Alex
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Re: Legal AsciiDoc

tbrooke
Thank You for the response

I am actually thinking about two separate contexts that could actually be unified somewhat.

The first is legislation and the second is documents and contracts - Since they often mirror each other common features would be helpful.

Two Attempts that I have seen are:

    Black Acre Labs

 
   Legal Markdown
   

I think key elements some of which are already in Asciidoc are paragraph numbering, section cross referencing, footnotes, etc. Frequently legal documents will often use Roman Numerals - although this may be outdated somewhat.

I am still new to Asciidocs so I have a lot of exploration of Asciidocs to do

The Legal world has been taken over by Word which is the standard for everything - I think it would be great if the form could be separated form the content of documents. Court documents have standard captions, service verifications, notary blocks, signature blocks and contracts, wills, deeds all have similar sub item. As discovery and document production have become automated it would be so much easier if we could just deal with ascii text and separate out the formats. THere are many tools for what is termed "document Assembly" to automate the creation of legal documents -, If we could use a format like Asciidocs then add templating tools like liquid or Moustache and then add version control tool like Git it would be a whole new world

Also Github is pushing government services and has an  initiative to place legislation on statutes on either github or some other place where it can be accessed, changed and updated. It seems to me that Asciidoc has the potential to be the perfect format for all of this material. The  Madison project for example looks to me like a project in need of a common format


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Re: Legal AsciiDoc

asotobu
Cool, I think that templating part could be avoided (maybe not I don't know all your requirements), but for example you can create a document, and the parts to be filled for user can be passed as AsciiDoc parameters, so you generate for example an HTML or PDF with the passed arguments. For example:

++++
= My title

I want that {name_of_person} can do something.

++++

and then you can call as:

+asciidoctor -a name_of_person=John+ document.adoc

of course the process of creating the arguments can be automated.

WDYT?
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Re: Legal AsciiDoc

tbrooke
I have looked at AsciiDoc further and you are right it can handle most legal needs including the templating.

I think there is some work with open source law related formats: http://opengovfoundation.org/the-madison-project/
but I don't know as they have settled on a format for the text - It seems to me that AsciiDoc would be perfect for this and it could extend to legal documents and agreements  - Like in the Video Dan Allen posted in the forum if content could be separated from content and a common API developed for legal materials it would be great

The big area I see lacking in Asciidoc is output - it is great for the web but what about the the things that need to go to paper

I noticed there is a pdf backend and a latex backend  - what about a doc backend?
What about formatting issues like margins, centering text, paragraph indents?
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Re: Legal AsciiDoc

asotobu
Good, these days Dan has added support in AsciiDoc for Math formulas (and characters), if you find that lawyer documents use some kind of special characters don't hesitate to illustrate us so we can improve the support for them inside Asciidoctor.