Some of our customers ask for end-user documentation in a format that’s suitable for printing. Currently, I use Microsoft Word 2002 to write the documents and a non-free PDF printer to generate a PDF file with searchable bookmarks. Then I store both files in the Subversion repositoryT. While it does the job, it has a few drawbacks:
- It is not version control friendly. More specifically, I cannot port changes between branches and it’s very difficult to handle branded stuff such as logos or screen captures.
- I sometimes forget some of the manual steps required to generate the output and the table of contents is missing from the PDF file.
I need a tool that works on Windows, allows to maintain parallel branches of the same document, offers a simple method to handle images (external files would be a plus) and generates high quality PDF files with searchable bookmarks. I’d also appreciate if it’s free or open-source and has a reasonable learning curve.
The goal is to produce printable end-user manuals for PHP-powered intranet sites, I’m not looking for online docs or an API documentation tool. What are your recommendations?
That may be a bit overkill but I’d recommend LyX. It is a cross platform, OSS, user friendly frontend to LaTeX.
The “source” files for the documentation are in text and version control and merge friendly. And using LyX instead of LaTeX directly is a great plus in term of learning curve.
We used it already for small group documentation and the ability merge in version control was a real benefit.