technical manual editing/publishing/collaboration online [closed]

Question

We have multiple software products, each with a manual in 6 languages.

We need to collaborate with users who want to contribute/edit the manuals.

We'd like to have a very user-friendly presentation of the manuals online. Ideally, we'd like to produce a nice and high quality PDF from the manuals suitable for printing.

Is there a tool that does this online? We've been trying to work with mediawiki but it's not an ideal solution and not really meant for producing manuals.

Answer 1

Atlassian Confluence is a good enterprise wiki which looks professional and supports all the niceties of things like PDF export, etc. straight out of the box. I'm not sure if it can generate entire manuals in PDF format, but it's certainly a good candidate for putting your documentation online in the first place.

You'd probably want to set it up to allow anonymous users to comment on individual pages, but not edit them. This would give you the "feedback" capability, and you could then incorporate their suggestions into the pages yourself. Potentially, you could organise things so that you have different sets of product documentation (e.g. different versions) in different spaces, and lock down "stable" versions.

Note that Confluence is commercially licensed.

Answer 2

I'd say Docbook, but the only pdfs I've made with it were horrible and it wasn't easy - may be worth a look, may be not.