I write most of my documents (blog posts, documentation, recipes and so on) with Asciidoctor. Everything is organized in Git repositories.

During GPN 19 (Gulaschprogrammiernacht) I showed how to build html and pdf with a Gitlab CI/CD pipeline. That’s quite handy, but lots of documents I build, I just need locally.

So today I played with WSL2 and a Makefile to build all Asciidoctor files in a directory.

Commandline to make pdf

asciidoctor-pdf source.adoc -o build/source.pdf

This builds a pdf in the directory build, but how can we create a pdf of some files?

Makefile

docs = $(wildcard *.adoc)            
pdfs = $(docs:.adoc=.pdf)            
all: $(pdfs)                         
.PHONY: all

# Call asciidoctor to generate $@ from $^
%.pdf: %.adoc
    asciidoctor-pdf $^ -o build/$@     

• Wildcard of all files with extension adoc in this directory

• Map .pdf instead of .adoc

• Run on all targets

• $@ is the PDF-File,
  $^ is the Source

So just running make will create all documents converted in pdf.

Extend the Makefile

#

Create all documents converted to html and pdf in extra folders. Add commandline option variable.

Makefile

docs := $(wildcard *.adoc)
pdfs := $(docs:.adoc=.pdf)
htmls := $(docs:.adoc=.html)
options := -a toc -a toclevels="1"
all: html pdf
pdf: $(pdfs)
html: $(htmls)
.PHONY: all pdf html

# Call asciidoctor to generate $@ from $^
%.pdf: %.adoc
    asciidoctor-pdf $^ $(options) -o build/pdf/$@

%.html: %.adoc
    asciidoctor $^ $(options) -o build/html/$@

So now running make creates html and pdf targets.

You can use this Makefile on Linux, Mac OS or Windows (with WSL) to convert a large scale of Asciidoctor files to your target.