Writing in Metanorma
How do I write in Metanorma?
Metanorma adopts the WYSIWYM (“what you see is what you mean”) paradigm based on the AsciiDoc markup syntax, allowing authoring standards with output exactly what you meant and how you wanted, without unnecessary formatting worries. This is similar in spirit to La(TeX) and Markdown.
That also means it is not WYSIWYG — you’ll be dealing with a plain-text editor and the command-line interface, rather than something that resembles, say, a Microsoft Word document. It might be confusing at first, but the upsides far outweigh the difficulty in learning how to use Metanorma.
For example, Metanorma facilitates machine-readability, automation, validation, automatic formatting, auto-numbering, and enables using a single canonical format for the re-generation of all document output formats.
Read more about the Metanorma approach.
|
Tip
|
If you are new to AsciiDoc, you might want to use the Asciidoctor AsciiDoc manual alongside this guidance. |
We have also published four blog entries on how to author a Metanorma document, step by step:
Recommended text editors
These editors have been reported to work well for writing Metanorma AsciiDoc:
-
Atom with Asciidoctor plugins
-
Microsoft Visual Studio Code with AsciiDoc extension for live preview
It’s perfectly fine to use any plain-text editor: and many developer-oriented editors support AsciiDoc live previews and syntax highlighting. For those that don’t, you will have to rely on log output from Metanorma during document generation.