The standard: DITA
DITA is a standard for generating several documents from a single source.
For instance, a company that makes kettles might have:
- A general presentation of the company
- A warning about the risks of kettles
- A description of SuperKettle
- A description of the features specific to the Deluxe version of SuperKettle
- A description of MiniKettle
- A catalog of all kettles
All of these parts are DITA fragments.
To generate the SuperKettle Deluxe manual, you would use a DITA tool that takes all of the relevant parts and combines them into a single document.
An implementation of the standard: DITA Open Toolkit
DITA Open Toolkit is an open source implementation of the DITA toolchain.
It is written in Java and runs on Windows/Mac/Linux.
User guide: http://www.dita-ot.org/2.1/user-guide/transforming-dita-content.html
The parts themselves must be written in DocbookDocbook or in the DITA-specified XMLDITA-specified XML, at your choice. Both formats have some WYSIWYG editors available.