Since one week my blog is build on the static-site-generator Hugo. I wanted to move to Hugo far earlier, due to the wide variety of themes. However this required the move from Asciidoc to Asciidoctor, and I experienced a few problems with the integration of Asciidoctor into my existing workflow. As the approach of rendering the latex-equations in the asciidoc-documents no longer worked, I decided to move on to client-based rendering of formulas, like done in KaTex and Mathjax.

While drafting a blog post, part of a series of posts intended to be published in the future, I discovered a lack of my tooling in Nikola. When adding mathematical formulas, I realized that there is no default-way of rendering images from those math formulas, and inserting them as image-tags into the html. Instead math formulas are handled via JS, which I try to reduce to an absolute minimum on my site. So I started to implement a rather quick-and-dirty plugin to do exactly this transformation, using latex and dvipng or dvisvgm. Then I come across this blog post where reading about asciidoc written in python and its successor asciidoctor written in ruby supporting different display formats. Ideal for the content I had in mind. So I installed the Nikola plugin asciidoc (which is mostly a wrapper to the asciidoc binary called as a subprocess), via

I picked up Nikola some months ago as I was searching for a simple static-site-generator to setup a blog with minimal effort.

To make things a bit more interesting and at the same time easier we will use Nikola in a Docker container. So I require an almost basic understanding for Docker here.

First create a directory on our host system, where you want the files stored, e.g. 'blog' in your home directory.