I love Asciidoc. It is akin to Markdown, but it provides more functionality, particularly when it comes to transcoding. You can take an AsciiDoc file and turn it into an HTML file with extensive CSS theme support, PDF, DocBook XML file, eBook – many more possibilities especially when using the Asciidoctor rendering engine.

I also love Sublime Text. I looked for a replacement for TextMate for a while, and a co-worker turned me on to it. It’s very flexible. Far more flexible than Notepad++, which is what I used at work for text manipulation. I love the fact that you can extend the editor very easily with Python and JSON configuration, though it has enough support on github that I only have needed to use Package Control to install the extensions I needed, such as one to escape and de-escape XML entities.

Despite that, I had been disappointed by its Asciidoc support until I had a revelation today. I’ve been lamenting that the Sublime Text 2 package for AsciiDoc didn’t seem to perform syntax highlighting in version 3, which is effectively in beta. I went so far as to do some research today to try to port the version 2 package to version 3.

In doing so, I sheepishly realized that syntax highlighting in Sublime Text is dependent on the color scheme you choose. And sure enough, my color scheme Monokai doesn’t have support for the style definitions Asciidoc uses.

Fortunately, the one I use at work, Sunburst, does. As soon as I changed schemes, it was – well, a burst of sunshine. Headers pop, text highlighting is visible. Triumph!

I feel foolish for not realizing this before. I kind of wish the console would show warnings like “I, as your color scheme, am ignoring this style I don’t recognize”.