software documentation system?

[Peter Hansen]

Graham Guttocks wrote:
> A Python application of mine is now large enough that I need to get
> more serious about writing a real manual for it.  I'm looking for a
> documentation system that uses a single source file to produce both
> online information and printed output. (PS, HTML, etc.)
> 
> Any recommendations?  I work in a UNIX environment and would prefer
> an opensource alternative.  So far I've found GNU texinfo and also
> SGMLtools which is written in Python, but am open to other
> suggestions.

It's not a completely "canned" solution, but if you were to use
XML for the content (perhaps using the DocBook vocabulary
http://www.oasis-open.org/docbook/ ), and XSLT stylesheets to 
generate the output (direct to HTML in one case, to XSLFO in 
another and then use, say, FOP to convert to PDF format)
you could build such a beast "relatively" easily (compared to
the less easy alternatives :-), using pure open source and
even some more Python (http://4suite.org/index.html for the XSLT).

This has the "advantage" of being about as bleeding edge as
you can get without passing out... ;-)

-- 
----------------------
Peter Hansen, P.Eng.
peter at engcorp.com