One of the biggest hurdles for new users is installing, configuring and using a DocBook XML toolchain. a2x(1) can help — it’s a toolchain wrapper command that will generate XHTML (chunked and unchunked), PDF, EPUB, DVI, PS, LaTeX, man page, HTML Help and text file outputs from an AsciiDoc text file. a2x(1) does all the grunt work associated with generating and sequencing the toolchain commands and managing intermediate and output files. a2x(1) also optionally deploys admonition and navigation icons and a CSS stylesheet. See the a2x(1) man page for more details. In addition to asciidoc(1) you also need xsltproc(1), DocBook XSL Stylesheets and optionally: dblatex or FOP (to generate PDF); w3m(1) or lynx(1) (to generate text).

The following examples generate doc/source-highlight-filter.pdf from the AsciiDoc doc/source-highlight-filter.txt source file. The first example uses dblatex(1) (the default PDF generator) the second example forces FOP to be used:

$ a2x -f pdf doc/source-highlight-filter.txt
$ a2x -f pdf --fop doc/source-highlight-filter.txt

See the a2x(1) man page for details.