Posted by dreamreal on Jun 18, 2013; 5:07pm
URL: https://discuss.asciidoctor.org/Development-guide-tp339.html

I've been looking into adding "aside text" in a fork of asciidoctor (in preparation to offer it back to the main dev tree), but I'm running into a bit of a roadblock in terms of development tools.

I'm not a Ruby developer, so I'm working from whole cloth, as it were.

First off, my goal: I use <aside> in HTML5 rather often. (Probably too often, but it helps cut down parentheticals.) (I know parentheticals are 'bad style' but I like them.) (I did say "too often," right?)

Aside text isn't the same as a pull quote, nor is it a block quote, although it is a block for HTML. (See http://html5doctor.com/aside-revisited/ and http://www.w3schools.com/tags/tag_aside.asp for some more information regarding aside.)

So I thought I'd add something similar to a blockquote, with something like the following syntax:

:::
This is aside text.
:::

(The symbols are, of course, up for debate; I chose ::: because it was somewhat visually significant. I originally wanted [[[ and ]]] but ... well, that brings me to the next part of this post.)

I don't know the right way to really dig into Asciidoctor's source. I installed RubyMine, and getting breakpoints to work has been "interesting" in ways one doesn't want "interesting" to mean.

I'd really prefer to be able to step through the tests to understand them, but... how are people developing asciidoctor? RubyMine looks great but honestly the debugging aspect makes it almost a nonstarter.