As several projects (JDF, CDI, Arquillian, etc) move more towards using lightweight markup languages for documentation, I see a real opportunity in JBossTools to provide an AsciiDoc (and perhaps Markdown) editor and preview pane, very similar to how the HTML editor works. (In fact, personally, I see more value in this tool than the HTML editor).

The features I'd like to see are:

* syntax highlighting

* syntax assistance and/or templates

* preview pane (split or as separate tab)

It may also be interesting to have a view which can help layout text-based diagrams. See AsciiFlow (http://asciiflow.com) to get the idea. Text-based diagramming can save developers a lot of time.

Although AsciiDoc is written in Python, it can be invoked in Java through Jython [1]. There is also effort underway to create a Ruby port, which would enable it to be called via JRuby [2].

[1] https://github.com/asciidoc/asciidoc-maven-plugin/blob/master/src/main/java/asciidoc/maven/plugin/PySystemObjectFactory.java

[2] https://github.com/erebor/asciidoctor
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Principal Software Engineer, Red Hat | Author of Seam in Action
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