How about creating manuals in mediawiki (and then export to odt and pdf when required)?

In my opinion, we should only have a single version of documentation for
both web, print, and the built-in "help." I was looking at this
project--Sphinx--and it looks like it could meet all of these needs.

http://sphinx.pocoo.org/

And it's open source!

Hi Jeff, :slight_smile:

In my opinion, we should only have a single version of documentation for
both web, print, and the built-in "help." I was looking at this
project--Sphinx--and it looks like it could meet all of these needs.

If you can persuade the devs to adopt Sphinx, it could be a good tool
for documenting the code base, but it's not relevant to the docs
team's needs...

But one single set of documentation for all media might make sense...

David Nelson

Jeff Prater wrote:

In my opinion, we should only have a single version of documentation for
both web, print, and the built-in "help."

I believe the built-in help is specific enough to be a text separate
from the other documentation; for example:
- a manual is a structured text, whereas the built-in help is just a set
of pages
- a manual is supposed to be read consequentially while the built-in
help has no fixed entry point and is mainly accessed by searching
- a manual will possibly be printed and should look nice printed, while
it doesn't make a lot of sense to print the built-in help

Regards,
  Andrea.

Jeff Prater wrote:
> In my opinion, we should only have a single version of documentation for
> both web, print, and the built-in "help."

I agree with what Andrea says.

In addition, the help file is supposed to explain the product screen-by-screen and control-by-control.
The reason is the user would mostly jump from a particular screen, and you have to help him about that screen.

On the other hand, a user's manual would have more theory (compared to built-in help) and also a different flow of topics.
So both these documents have to be separate.

Probably Microsoft has tried to solve this by inserting "All about" sections in its help file.
So while the help screen focuses on the controls of a particular screen, the overall picture is not lost.
The user has TWO choices now: He can check what a control does, or understand the entire topic top-down.