FWIW, I and my coauthors are writing "Clojure Programming" for O'Reilly using asciidoc[1]. Our source ends up being converted to a beautiful PDF using a post-commit hook that performs a translation from asciidoc -> docbook -> PDF.
I've enjoyed it so much that I'm now using asciidoc for my github readme's and such, and will likely use it for future documentation-generation requirements (e.g. generating PDF and HTML versions of library developer guides and such). For those that need mathematical notation, it appears that asciidoc just uses passthrough blocks of LaTeX math notation (or direct MathML if you're so inclined)[2].
Do you have an example PDF for that? For the average use, TeX is overkill (sometimes OK), but if you need the finest possible typography, TeX yields its power. And then the XSL-FO formatters are pretty fast disappointing.
Not that I can post publicly. It should be available as an O'Reilly Rough Cut soon; if you snag it (or any PDF ebook version of it), you're looking at an asciidoc-sourced PDF.
AFAIK, the vast majority of O'Reilly books pass through docbook at some point (many authors write in docbook directly, some portion of them use asciidoc like us), so if you look at any O'Reilly PDF ebook, chances are good it was generated from docbook (at least as an intermediate format).
Seconded. AsciiDoc is enough like writing a plain-text e-mail that everything but the writing just falls away.
For a little more control, you can feed the generated DocBook to something like Remko's DocBook kit (https://github.com/remko/docbook-kit), which downloads and runs the various document processors for converting to PDF in stages--with gnarly XML config files available for each stage. This can be helpful for trying to match a specific conference template, for instance.
I've enjoyed it so much that I'm now using asciidoc for my github readme's and such, and will likely use it for future documentation-generation requirements (e.g. generating PDF and HTML versions of library developer guides and such). For those that need mathematical notation, it appears that asciidoc just uses passthrough blocks of LaTeX math notation (or direct MathML if you're so inclined)[2].
[1] http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc
[2] http://www.methods.co.nz/asciidoc/userguide.html#X78