how to bypass use of [bibliography] ?

while it is nice to have integrated support for special document sections such as a bibliography I would prefer to bypass it (just as with the original asciidoc) since the available functionality seems rather constraining.

here's my problem:
The original asciidoc does linking/formatting of bibliography entries independently of whether they appear in a "true" [bibliography] or an ordinary section ("== MyBibliography", say). so the example from the manual:

_The Pragmatic Programmer_ <<prag>> should be required reading for
all developers.

[bibliography]
- [[[prag]]] Andy Hunt & Dave Thomas. The Pragmatic Programmer:
  From Journeyman to Master. Addison-Wesley. 1999.
- [[[seam]]] Dan Allen. Seam in Action. Manning Publications.
  2008.

works of course but

_The Pragmatic Programmer_ <<prag>> should be required reading for
all developers.

== References
- [[[prag]]] Andy Hunt & Dave Thomas. The Pragmatic Programmer:
  From Journeyman to Master. Addison-Wesley. 1999.
- [[[seam]]] Dan Allen. Seam in Action. Manning Publications.
  2008.

does not (it shows empty pairs of brackets "[]" rather than "[prag]").

question: is there any principal reason, why asciidoctor could not handle stuff in triple brackets [[[stuff]]] and <<stuff>> references always the same, i.e. independently of whether they belong to a dedicated [bibliography] section (and also not enforcing that it happens only in list entries)?

another observation: modifying the example above to:

_The Pragmatic Programmer_ <<1>> should be required reading for
all developers.

[bibliography]
- [[[1]]] Andy Hunt & Dave Thomas. The Pragmatic Programmer:
  From Journeyman to Master. Addison-Wesley. 1999.
- [[[2]]] Dan Allen. Seam in Action. Manning Publications.
  2008.

i.e. using numerical rather than text labels seemingly breaks formatting in the bibliography (the entries are labeled verbatim with [[[1]]] rather than with single brackets). what am I missing here?

any advice on these issues would be appreciated.

thx, joerg

I struggled with this too, as I wanted:

See [5].

== References
[5] Pragmatic programmer.

and in the current implementation I couldn't suppress the bullet.

My (ugly) work around is to use inline anchors and hard code the numbers:

== Intro
_The Pragmatic Programmer_ [<<prag>>] should be required reading for all developers.

== References
[3] [[prag,3]]Andy Hunt & Dave Thomas. The Pragmatic Programmer:  From Journeyman to Master. Addison-Wesley. 1999

Asciidoctor-bibtex looks promising, but  I couldn't get it to work with Asciidoctorj. If you manage it, please let me know how.

Re your second question, [[[3]]] probably fails because "3" is not a valid id name (allows lower case letters, digits, periods, hyphens, underscores, but must not start with a digit).

You could also consider the asciidoctor-bibliography gem which separates citations from cross-references.

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