What tools does your team use for writing user manuals? [closed]

Answer 1

Pandoc is a fantastic tool for converting between various markup formats. We write docs in markdown and use Pandoc to convert to other formats.

From the pandoc site:

If you need to convert files from one markup format into another, pandoc is your swiss-army knife. Pandoc can read markdown and (subsets of) reStructuredText, textile, HTML, and LaTeX, and it can write plain text, markdown, reStructuredText, HTML, LaTeX, ConTeXt, PDF, RTF, DocBook XML, OpenDocument XML, ODT, GNU Texinfo, MediaWiki markup, textile, groff man pages, Emacs org-mode, EPUB ebooks, and S5 and Slidy HTML slide shows. PDF output (via LaTeX) is also supported with the included markdown2pdf wrapper script.

Pandoc gets extra points for being open source and written in the hotness that is Haskell ;)

Answer 2

At my current job we churn out single-use software so documentation often gets put on the sideline and is done in Word.

At my last job, however, the documentation team seemed to continuously rant and rave about mad cap software's product "Flare". It allows you to write in one format and publish to many mediums so your manual can also be your online help or a website, etc...

Answer 3

Try Sphinx. All python documentation is made using this tool http://docs.python.org/

Answer 4

We use help and manual for manual and help file. There is no html export, but it provides html help, winhelp, pdf and some more formats.

Answer 5

Although it may not answer all your requests, DokuWiki may be worth taking a look at.

As with other wikis, it has a simple syntax, and has version control to track revisions, generates table of contents, and a full-text search feature which can come handy for a help system.

You may want to evaluate the feature list to see if it will meet your needs.

Also, there seems to also be a good collection of avaialble plugins. Although I haven't used DokuWiki or its plugins, there seems to be plugins available for PDF export as well.