There was some off-topic discussion in another about technical authoring tools, thought I would add something to this sleeping beauty.
I've always used Word for documentation but it does get in the way sometimes.
What is the next step up for a small sized engineering company (<50) with no dedicated technical authors?
PDF document properties sometimes show the tool used to create the document.
Looking at some random datasheets from big name manufacturers I noticed:
There is an aerospace documentation standard S1000D
https://s1000d.org/ with software tooling prices beyond my range of interest.
From the above it seems there is no clear winner.
Myself, I'm not interested in Desktop Publishing packages, I just want simple text based entry (for easy version control integration and zero-distraction editing) and click a few buttons to produce PDF, HTML and maybe ePub, using pre-designed template formatting. Having looked around I think the options in my company would be:
Topleaf
Never tried it but looks interesting. Pricing at my limit. The TI datasheets certainly looks great but likely that's after many, many hours of template design.
Template design difficulty unknown.
DocBook
An XML format which is well supported by editors such as OxygenXML or XMLmind or maybe XmetaL. Pandoc amoung others for output.
Template design difficulty unknown.
Asciidoctor
Looks like a nice simple entry syntax. Can generate PDF, HTML and DocBook outputs.
Template design difficulty unknown.
Latex
Old but still an option I think, although I've never seen datasheets produced with it.
It can produce great looking documents but from my thesis days I remember customising output formats was a huge effort.
Summary: beware, lots of rabbit holes to disappear down!....sigh, back to Word for now.