Asciidoctor-pdf:: this is the Ruby prawn-based thing, it's the current official path, but SVG and images can choke it. Complex customization means extensions, and that has its own overhead.
FOPUB aka docbook-xsl:: this is built in to the AsciidocFX dedicated editor, and uses the DocBook-XSL pipeline. Yeah, I know, it's XSL, but since DocBook has such a long tail there's a huge amount of customization that's possible, along with some docbook-only features like better indices, list of figures, etc. It's also very capable of chewing through thousand page books if it's in its own environment. But again, XSL.
asciidoctor-web-pdf:: this is the semi-experimental web based PDF tool, based on Paged.js, that uses the CMM Paged Media Module Level 3 (CMM PMM L3). I think this is built in to Antora now. This has the best promise, in my opinion, but it's still pretty raw, again, in my opinion. Bring your JS and your CSS hat. Chews through some huge amounts of memory . . ah wait, they fixed that.
After these you have DBLATEX, which uses DocBook->LaTeX as its typesetting, and you have the Haskell thing, and the wiki-2-PDF converter that's default in Visual Studio Code Asciidoctor extension. There's a few others that have largely stalled, like the packt build system for docx, but they're interesting. I still use the packt thing.
Asciidoctor-pdf:: this is the Ruby prawn-based thing, it's the current official path, but SVG and images can choke it. Complex customization means extensions, and that has its own overhead.
FOPUB aka docbook-xsl:: this is built in to the AsciidocFX dedicated editor, and uses the DocBook-XSL pipeline. Yeah, I know, it's XSL, but since DocBook has such a long tail there's a huge amount of customization that's possible, along with some docbook-only features like better indices, list of figures, etc. It's also very capable of chewing through thousand page books if it's in its own environment. But again, XSL.
asciidoctor-web-pdf:: this is the semi-experimental web based PDF tool, based on Paged.js, that uses the CMM Paged Media Module Level 3 (CMM PMM L3). I think this is built in to Antora now. This has the best promise, in my opinion, but it's still pretty raw, again, in my opinion. Bring your JS and your CSS hat. Chews through some huge amounts of memory . . ah wait, they fixed that.
After these you have DBLATEX, which uses DocBook->LaTeX as its typesetting, and you have the Haskell thing, and the wiki-2-PDF converter that's default in Visual Studio Code Asciidoctor extension. There's a few others that have largely stalled, like the packt build system for docx, but they're interesting. I still use the packt thing.