Re: So what you just said was
Oops, yes, I was being sarcastic :-)
Thoroughly agree about LaTeX - especially as, given all comments about trying to use HTML so-called "manuals", I can turn my head to the right an see, oooh, two feet of dead-tree books, all beautifully typeset, from Don's Blue Lion, Leslie's more staid lion, to the TUG 25th anniversary collection! Well-thumbed: have got to straighten out the spiral binding again. </fanboy>
I've had some very nice results from getting the raw text written in Markdown (or into a Wiki that can be stripped into Markdown), so that authors are not distracted from the meaning by loads of formatting (and when they try to get clever it is easy to strip out! Mwaahaha). Then collate those into a semblance of order, shove it all into Pandoc to be converted into LaTeX (pulling in a template with all the proper formatting) and finally into XeLaTeX to generate the final PDF.
The lesson from all of the above: scripts are your friend! Oh, and Markdown is Good Enough for collecting text *and* plays well with Version Control.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
