In a previous post we learned about callouts in Asciidoctor to add explanation to source code. While surfing the Internet I came upon the following blog post by Alex Soto: Auto-numbered Callouts in Asciidoctor. I turns out that since Asciidoctor 1.5.8 we can use a dot (.) instead of explicit numbers to have automatic increasing numbering for the callouts.

Let’s take our example from the earlier blog post and now use auto numbered callouts:

= Callout sample
:source-highlighter: prettify
:icons: font

[source,groovy]
----
package com.mrhaki.adoc

class Sample {
    String username // <.>

    String toString() {
        "${username?.toUpperCase() ?: 'not-defined'}" // <.>
    }
}
----
<.> Simple property definition where Groovy will generate the `setUsername` and `getUsername` methods.
<.> Return username in upper case if set, otherwise return `not-defined`.

When we convert this markup to HTML we get the following result:

This makes it very easy to add new callouts without having to change all numbers we first typed by hand.

Written with Asciidoctor 2.0.9

Original post