Eh, I'd say they're pretty different goals and use cases in reality. Pandoc is great for translation into other formats, where the other format then is applied final styling using downstream tools.
AsciiDoctor is for the Asciidoc format, but, generally includes some nice tooling for commonly used output formats.
Yes, you can use pandoc to convert asciidoc to something else, but in general, I've noticed that asciidoctor has great support for HTML themes:
The PDF styling directly out of the asciidoctor tool, on the other hand, isn't as advanced. So going from asciidoc to DocBook can make sense here, and I think is probably still done to do things like create truly professional looking PDFs.
What to use? Depends on your toolchain. I almost never need anything but HTML and PDF.
I've found that people, used to Markdown, can jump into Asciidoc and use `asciidoctor` easily.
AsciiDoctor is for the Asciidoc format, but, generally includes some nice tooling for commonly used output formats.
Yes, you can use pandoc to convert asciidoc to something else, but in general, I've noticed that asciidoctor has great support for HTML themes:
https://asciidoctor.org/docs/produce-custom-themes-using-asc...
https://github.com/darshandsoni/asciidoctor-skins
The PDF styling directly out of the asciidoctor tool, on the other hand, isn't as advanced. So going from asciidoc to DocBook can make sense here, and I think is probably still done to do things like create truly professional looking PDFs.
What to use? Depends on your toolchain. I almost never need anything but HTML and PDF.
I've found that people, used to Markdown, can jump into Asciidoc and use `asciidoctor` easily.