collaborative editing

[Doug Holton]

Michele Simionato wrote:
> Suppose I want to write a book with many authors via the Web. The book has 
> a hierarchical structure with chapter, sections, subsections, subsubsections, 
> etc. At each moment it must be possible to print the current version of the 
> book in PDF format. There must be automatic generation of the table of contents,
> indices, etc. Conversions to many formats (Latex, DocBook, etc.) would be
> welcome. Does something like that already exists? Alternatively, I would need
> some hierarchical Wiki with the ability of printing its contents in an
> structured way. 

You want a wiki engine.  There are many to choose from, some of which 
have all the features you want.
See for example Atlassian Confluence.  We are using it to create 
documentation for boo ( http://boo.codehaus.org ).  This page for 
example has child pages and you can export pages to html, pdf, or xml.
http://docs.codehaus.org/display/BOO/Recipes
http://docs.codehaus.org/spaces/exportspace.action?key=BOO

I think the PHP/MySQL-based Tiki wiki has similar features, too.
http://tikiwiki.org/tiki-index.php