FYI, asciidoc is great, provides a pipeline to docbook (and thence on to PDF), and is a joy to edit (not quite as concise as, say, markdown, but not ambiguously-defined, either). See my other comment on this thread about it.
asciidoc is nice, but the tag set in DocBook is far broader. Also, DocBook makes it easy to add new elements. But if you need just the basic functionality of DocBook, it is great.
True enough. I've needed some bits of docbook that don't have a direct asciidoc corollary twice, and just used asciidoc passthrough blocks to use them. It's a very practical solution to a leaky abstraction, while allowing me to stay in asciidoc 99.7% of the time.
