Documentation compiler

I would like to know what teams out there are using to consolidate and compile their documentation work from various staff into a single Word or PDF document file.

 

When there are several members working on various aspects of the project/system, it is obvious no single individual can effectively write everything about the system especially portions s/he did not work on. Everybody ends up producing their own Word document. While there is sort of a standard to the formatting, most people are not up to par with the Word formatting/styling skills and it is a huge pain to consolidate together and expect the header numberings and alignments to be preserved.

 

What types of techniques can be used to allow the developers just write "plain HTML" without worrying about the "CSS"? We'd like to leave the formatting to another person who compiles all the content together.

u have 2 options either use
DocumentX  (trialware but pretty intelligent)
http://www.innovasys.com/products/dx2008/overview.aspx

or NDoc (opensource but don't have so many features as DocumentX)
http://ndoc.sourceforge.net/

Quote: been there and experienced how life is without documentation

Not talking about documenting code.

It is business/user requirements, functional specs, design artifacts, test scripts, etc.

if you are talking about document managing tool for versioning and consolidating their versions, there are some tools out there.

but if you are saying about tool helping you to format your use case diagram , er diagram, user documents to a particular standard,
i am afraid you have tough luck finding one because each of these document conforms to a particular standard which it is impossible to consolidate all the standards together as we know standards keep changing...like uml 1 to uml 2.0.

The immediate concern is largely about Word style and formatting. Not everybody may have the correct sizing, header number listing, identation, paragraph spacing in their documents (the world is not ideal after all). We feel there should be an "intermediate" document format that is pure content, like HTML. Developers just write their documentation for the system using the content mode, then a person can collect, copy and paste, and apply the "CSS" to the resultant document.

Currently, the situation is a very painful one with constant messing of styling.