Tools for Publishing in Multiple Formats?

Truist asks: "What are the best tools (windows or *nix) to use to publish a single source document in multiple formats, specifically plain text, multi-page HTML, and PDF? I'm trying to publish a (60-page+) NetBSD installation guide/documentary online, and I want plain text for easy download and 'less'-ability, HTML for easy browsing and search engine indexing, and PDF or Postscript for easy printing. It's currently a Word document (I know, I know - I'm happy to manually convert it to something else) with multiple styles, including regular text, lists, internal links, external (web url) links, code, and notes, and I'd like to preserve as much as possible of each in the final output. Some additional notes: there are no graphics, and I expect to update this document periodically, or to split it into parts and maintain the parts (think master document / subdocuments). It won't be updated too often, but if re-publishing could be scriptable, that would be fantastic."

Comments

Docbook.. (again)

[camilita]

I have seen a variation of this question at least two times posted here. The unanymous answer is usually docbook and in this case is more relevennt, since the document is technical in nature.

good pick is DocBook: The Definitive Guide written by Norma Walsh (who chairs the Oasis DocBook Technical Committee) and published by O'Reilly that. Of course the book is also available in HTML, PDF and plain text.

I like tex

[jrstewart]

Specifically latex, and more specifically pdflatex for pdf output and tex2page for html. With some hacking you should be able to script tex2page into outputting text as well.

To some extent the texinfo folks have solved this problem as well. The DocBook stuff mentioned elsewhere might be very nice but I have no experience with that.