What about perl pod? Perl pod (Plain Old Documentation) is a pretty good system and, in hindsight, I guess I could simply have improved it, but at the time (2002) it did not seem high enough calibre for serious technical document production (its apparent main focus is on generating software documentation). POD appeals only a little to the neophyte audience.
Why not just edit directly LaTeX? Pure LaTeX is not human readable and format conversions from LaTeX to, say, DocBook or HTML were at the time (2002) much less than perfect. LaTeX does not appeal to neophyte audience.
Why not just edit directly DocBook? Pure DocBook is not human readable and the syntax (as most XML syntax) is
too baroque for human editing. Sure you can edit it using
emacs, but you will soon start to think "there's gotta
be a better way". If you use some <
What about Lyx? Lyx is a GUI. I do not want a GUI. Lyx output is quite texish, thus not very human readable and thus the Lyx document can not be used as the plain text document. Back in 2002 LyX plain text output left much to desire. Sure, LyX does appeal to certain category of neophyte user, but I think it does not help to wean people off the GUI and WYSIWYG model (despite the claims to contrary by LyX team). LyX documents can not be easily diffed since the gui is liable to reformat the entire underlying file any time you do any change.
Word will do the job! No. Word is a GUI. Word is not plain text format and word documents are very prone to corruption. Word plain text output leaves much to desire. Word does not run on all platforms. Word documents can not be diffed using simple tools.
OpenOffice? Mainly same gripes as with Word. OpenOffice XML file format (or DocBook format) still suffers from the GUI capital crime: any change to the document and the entire XML is liable to be reformatted. This makes diffing them hell (it also does not play nice with cvs, but this is minor point).