Convert documents from AsciiDoc to Org

By . Published on 2021-08-06.

To convert an AsciiDoc document to an Org document, convert to Docbook as an intermediate step, then send the Docbook file to Pandoc to convert it to Org1, 2: 

asciidoctor \
    --backend docbook \
    --out-file - \
    hello.adoc | \
    pandoc \
          --from docbook \
          --wrap=preserve \
          --standalone \
          --output hello.org

This command pipes two commands together to produce the desired result:

asciidoctor --backend docbook --out-file - hello.adoc
Take the hello.adoc file and convert it to Docbook. Pass - as the --out-file to return the output to standard output
pandoc --from-docbook --wrap=preserve --standalone --output hello.org
Take the input file and convert it from Dobook to Org. Preserve the line wrapping instead of wrapping each line to 80 characters, and create a “standalone” document including document headers, as opposed to a document “fragment”.

Given an AsciiDoc file: 

= Hello, World!
Alice
2021-08-06

Hello, World!

[source,ruby]
----
  puts "Hello, World!"
----

The command above produces an Org file including the document headers, contents, and code blocks: 

#+title: Hello, World!

#+author: Alice
#+date: 2021-08-06

Hello, World!

#+begin_src ruby
    puts Hello, World!
#+end_src

  1. https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/emacs-orgmode/2018-02/msg00295.html:

    I have a large document (a book) written in AsciiDoc, and I’ve been thinking of converting it to org-mode, which I find eminently more readable. The method I’ve come up with is:

    1. AsciiDoc -> Docbook using asciidoc or asciidoctor
    2. Docbook -> org using pandoc
    ↩︎

  2. https://pandoc.org/MANUAL.html#using-pandoc:

    By default, pandoc produces a document fragment. To produce a standalone document (e.g. a valid HTML file including <head> and <body>), use the -s or --standalone flag: 

    pandoc -s -o output.html input.txt
    ↩︎