Posted by thierrybo on Apr 16, 2019; 5:45pm
URL: https://discuss.asciidoctor.org/Flexibility-of-PDF-Output-and-Hyphenation-tp5303p6849.html

mojavelinux wrote

You're correct that AsciidocFX is a editor / frontend for Asciidoctor.
While we're excited about it's growth, you'll always get the best
publishing experience using the Asciidoctor tools directly (esp as they
continue to evolve themselves). That's true of any abstraction you
introduce.

The official tool in Asciidoctor for converting to PDF is Asciidoctor PDF.

Hi, sorry to dig up an old post. I am currently  discovering/learning asciidoc, asciidoctor, asciidoctor-pdf and I wonder about your sentence on asciidoctor PDF being the official tool for converting pdf files.

I understand it is easier to use asciidoctor-pdf, but as far as I am concerned there is also the a2x tool in asciidoctor.  It does all the grunt work associated with generating and sequencing the toolchain commands and managing intermediate and output files. So once you installed dependencies (for Debian):

#apt install docbook-xsl asciidoc-dblatex fop xsltproc

It is as easy to type:

a2x -f pdf file.adoc

as

asciidoctor-pdf file.adoc

what interests me the most is which one will be the easier to customize PDF output. For now I don't know which way to choose, seeing the default different outputs:
basic-example_a2x.pdf
basic-example__ascidoctor-pdf.pdf
basic-example__asciidocFX.pdf