I'm working on a project where I need to generate end-user documentation for a piece of software. At some point in next year, the piece of software that I am writing this documentation will be retired. Therefore, I do not wish to spend a great deal of time on a professional-grade manual. This is something that graduate students at a college, and a few in house professionals, will be seeing. Though if it's good and useful enough, I might feed it back into the opensource community as free documentation.I was thinking that an HTML manual would be a good fit. The software is written in PHP, so whomever is using it will have a web browser open and ready to go. This also leads to the possibility of me, or someone else, integrating the manual's pages into the software itself.I am not interested in making/using a wiki for this piece of software. What I am really looking for is a piece of software where I can write like a normal document and generate simple HTML. I know that there are pieces of software like Dreamweaver and Frontpage but I was particularly interested in something designed to make the process of documentation creation easier (where the process of taking screen-caps and videos is integrated along with simple image/video editing).If you think that another approach (other than HTML docs) might be better, I'd love to hear it. If you have another approach, and you think you know a good software solution for achieving that, let me know.My main desires for the approach and the software to achieve it are
- Simplicity in deployment (HTML pages require no special setup. A help directory can simply be deployed with all the manual pages in it)
- No special software required to utilize (HTML can be read by everyone that has a web browser)
- Ease of use for me writing the documentation / small learning curve (I don't want to spend a lot of time learning a complicated piece of software to work on a relatively small project)
- Ability to combine text, videos, and images into single documents (HTML pages obviously support displaying all of these together)