Cellular Network Infrastructure

Right now we are using a2x to convert from asciidoc to pdf. This means, that actually we are going through the following chain of conversions:

adoc -> docbook -> latex -> pdf

As described here: http://asciidoc.org/publishing-ebooks-with-asciidoc.html

If we used asciidoctor-pdf instead, we could directly convert to pdf:

adoc -> pdf

https://github.com/asciidoctor/asciidoctor-pdf

In theory, we should need a lot less dependencies then, have the conversion go faster and less sources for errors. We could hopefully remove this part, for example:

        a2x $(A2X_OPTS) $(notdir $<) || (echo "ERROR: a2x failed! Running asciidoc to get verbose errors..."; \
            asciidoc -v $(ASCIIDOC_OPTS) $(notdir $<); exit 1)

https://git.osmocom.org/osmo-gsm-manuals/tree/build/Makefile.asciidoc.inc?id=abadcd5f8a663695b6c8d0d249806e81116570e7#n76

The downside is, that currently asciidoctor-pdf is only available from debian 10 (buster) onwards:

https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=asciidoctor%2Dpdf

Maybe we can adopt this at some point in the future, when asciidoctor-pdf is included in the oldest debian release that we support.