How to keep word document, html and pdf documentation aligned

Posted by dendini on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by dendini
Published on 2013-11-05T08:32:23Z Indexed on 2013/11/05 10:10 UTC
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Is there a way to write documentation in a WYSIWYG editor which can then export into HTML, WORD and PDF and keep copies synchronized?

This documentation are mostly technical notes and some contextual help for some softwares so they must contain images and some styling, they are not programmer's documentation (API list or functions list) for which probably a program like Javadoc or Doxygen would be the best choice.

For example how do companies with hundreds different software lines and thousands of programmers deal with this?

I have several solutions but they all seem lacking in some aspect:

Latex/Tex : very good pdf and html export, not very user friendly and no full-blown WYSIWYG editor available.
LibreOffice/OpenOffice : full blown WYSIWYG editor however html export not so good (need to edit manually exported html which needs to be maintained separately )
Mediawiki or any other wiki : could be keeping documentation in wikitext format, so html is automatically generated, pdf exportation is quite good with many available plugins. Again however need some formation for the staff to use it and need to setup a server for this.

Notice I'm not asking for software A vs software B, I'm asking for general advice, big companies procedures for documentation and yes some software product names if available.

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