I found a more satisfying way to keep the change minimal: it turns out that [preface] does exactly what we want. It just adds the missing id and the title. No renumbering, etc. See https://docs.asciidoctor.org/asciidoc/latest/sections/preface/ I attached the diff of user-manual.xml, user-manual.texi, git.info, user-manual.html (using html2markdown) and user-manual.pdf (using pdftotext) in the commit message which I also reworded and shortened. Firmin Martin (1): user-manual.txt: assign preface an id and a title Documentation/user-manual.txt | 3 +++ 1 file changed, 3 insertions(+) -- 2.31.1.133.g84d06cdc06