AsciiDoc to JPEG Converter

AsciiDoc is what happens when lightweight markup grows up. Where Markdown stops at bold and lists, AsciiDoc carries title pages, multi-level sections, callouts, admonitions, xrefs and real table syntax — enough to author entire technical books without leaving plain text. The Git and Linux-kernel documentation ecosystems standardized on it, rendered through Asciidoctor.

The format's weakness is tooling gravity: AsciiDoc converters outside the Asciidoctor/Ruby world are scarce, which is exactly where Pandoc fills the gap. Converting to Word hands manuscripts to editors who live in Office; converting to Markdown feeds modern docs sites. The section structure and tables survive the trip.

JPG (short for JPEG, the Joint Photographic Experts Group committee that standardized it in 1992) has been the default photo format for over three decades. It compresses photographs using the discrete cosine transform: the image is split into 8×8 blocks, and details the human eye is bad at noticing are discarded. The result is files many times smaller than uncompressed data, at a quality level you control when saving.

In practice JPG is unbeatable for photographs and smooth gradients — camera memory cards, messaging apps and the web all assume it. It is a poor fit for screenshots, logos or anything with sharp edges and flat color, where compression leaves visible ringing around text. There is no transparency support, color depth is capped at 8 bits per channel, and every re-save with compression compounds tiny generational losses.