How can I customize the {localdate} format?

The default format for the {localdate} attribute is the ISO 8601 yyyy-mm-dd format. You can change this format by explicitly setting the {localdate} attribute. For example by setting it using the asciidoc(1) -a command-line option:

$ asciidoc -a localdate=`date +%d-%d-%Y` mydoc.txt

You could also set it by adding an Attribute Entry to your souce document, for example:

:localdate: {sys: date +%Y-%m-%d}

Since it's set using an executable attribute you'll also need to include the —unsafe option when you run asciidoc).

Why doesn't AsciiDoc support strike through text?

The reason it's not in the distribution is that DocBook does not have provision for strike through text and one of the AsciiDoc design goals is that AsciiDoc markup should be applicable to all output formats.

Strike through is normally used to mark deleted text — a more comprehensive way to manage document revisions is to use a version control system such as Subversion. You can also use the AsciiDoc CommentLines and CommentBlocks to retain revised text in the source document.

If you really need strike through text for (X)HTML outputs then adding the following to a configuration file will allow you to quote strike through text with hyphen characters:

 ifdef::basebackend-html[]

 [quotes]
 -=strikethrough

 [tags]
 strikethrough=<span style="text-decoration: line-through;">|</span>

 endif::basebackend-html[]

Where can I find examples of commands used to build output documents?

The User Guide has some. You could also look at ./doc/main.aap in the AsciiDoc distribution, it has all the commands used to build the AsciiDoc documentation (even if you don't use A-A-P you'll still find it useful).

How can I place a backslash character in front of an attribute reference without escaping the reference?

Use the {backslash} attribute reference instead of an actual backslash, for example if the {projectname} attribute has the value foobar then:

d:\data{backslash}{projectname}

would be rendered as:

d:\data\foobar

Why have you used the DocBook <simpara> element instead of <para>?

<simpara> is really the same as <para> except it can't contain block elements which more closely matches the AsciiDoc paragraph semantics.