Generating CHM help and PDF manual from the same source [closed]

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We are t开发者_StackOverflowrying to find a set of tools to generate context-sensitive help files (CHM) and manuals (CHM and PDF) from the same sources.

Features wanted are:

• able to deal with linked hypertext
• must be able to generate CHM and PDF from
• should be able to integrate documentation generated from code (currently XML comments)
• cross-file links would be great
• source format being plain text (SCM diff-able) would be truly glorious

I suppose that just about every software shop must have run into this problem.

How do you do this?

What tools do you use?

What's your experience with those?

Edit: I thought every shop providing Windows software would have to solve this and many of you would have input for this. It seems I was wrong. although I still wonder how you all do this.

Anyway, thanks for the input of those who answered. We haven't decided yet, but this bounty runs out in a few hours. Unless someone comes in with a glorious suggestion, since the answer suggesting docbook got the most up-votes, I'll pick that one.

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Have you considered DocBook? You can render that as just about anything. See this Code Project article for examples for CHM generation.

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Check out Help And Manual http://helpandmanual.com/products_hm_features.html

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I love this product

http://www.helpndoc.com/

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You could achieve what you want if you implement the following:

1) Generate Html from XML

2) Generate CHM from Html

You can use Microsoft Html Help workshop to generate CHM files using Html, see: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=00535334-c8a6-452f-9aa0-d597d16580cc&displaylang=en

3) Generate PDF from Html using an Html-to-PDF tool.