Converting Asciidoctor documents to Microsoft Word

You know, I love Asciidoctor! It's an amazing way to author and publish. I even built up a publishing pipeline called Bootiful Asciidoctor. That's a story for another day. In the meantime, I put together a, let's say pamphlet, or a particularly long article, using Asciidoctor. Not a full e-book. And, in order to move the process forward, I need to turn the output into a Microsoft Word document. So what's an awesome Asciidoctor author to do? Automate, obviously!

Asciidoctor doesn't support direct transformations to everything, but it does support enough transformations that one of the products of those transformations ought to be enough to get where you're going. In my case, it's with the help of a Haskell command line utility called pandoc and the Docbook format.

So, step one: turn your documentation into a Docbook document:

asciidoctor my.adoc --backend docbook -o output.docbook

Then, turn the output of that - output.docbook - into a Microsoft Word .docx file with pandoc, like this:

pandoc -f docbook -t docx  ./output.docbook -o output.docx

Ét voilá! Send that output.docx to the unwashed in your workflow.