I should preface this by saying that this post should almost surely be a community wiki, though I don't know how to set that up. If someone could change this I would really appreciate it.
We're working on a product that is a web-based application. We'd like to get some conceptual user documentation integrated into the app, preferably as an html-based solution, but there don't seem to be any great options in .NET. Ideally, our solution would allow us to:
- create indexes automatically, based on page/topic names
- create a glossary
- allow easy "wiki-linking" from one topic to another
- create printable hard copies or PDFs of the entire documentation set
- update documentation without having to dive into either XML, or some other markup language or transforms (i.e., no XSLT)
Note that this is end-user documentation, and not developer/API documentation
My gut feeling is that the ideal solution would be something like a distributable, non-editable wiki.
It seems like Sandcastle is able to do most of this with its "conceptual documentation," but it is unwieldy to say the least - everything has to be written in MAML, there's no visual editor (or even a simple one, using say, markdown), and linking between documents is difficult. Ditto for Doxygen, I believe.
We've also looked at Sphinx, the python-based doc tool, but if possible we'd like to stick to the .NET stack.
Are there any other tools that I can look at? It seems like a portable wiki-type tool is something that should exist, right?