New iBATIS Documentation Format

[Clinton Begin]

Hi everyone...

In another thread that wasn't appropriately named, we raised the issue of the iBATIS documentation formats.  What caused me to reopen this as a new thread is that someone just recommended APT, which seems very interesting (read and see below for more).

We'd like our documentation tool to meet the following goals:

Developer/Author criteria -- The following are key to maintaining high quality and timely documentation.  Developers need to have a low barrier to documentation.

• Accessible / freely available to all
  
• Easy / familiar
  
• Portable / Available for all desktop platforms
  
• "Diffable" / Merge / Compare features.
  
• Participative / Community Capable
  
• Quick Changes / Deployment
  

User/Reader criteria -- The following ensure that readers of the documentation have options.

• Printable
  
• "Bundlable" with distribution
  
• "Downloadable"
• "Browsable"
• "Searchable"
• Multi-format: PDF, HTML -- to achieve the above goals.
  

Alternatives discussed so far:

• OpenOffice.org -- currently the choice of iBATIS for Java documentation.  Excels at accessibility, ease of use, but really sucks at participation, quick changes and deployment.  All other criteria are met but not exceeded.
• DocBook -- currently the choice of iBATIS.NET documentation.  It excels at "diffability" and multi-format including great PDF and HTML output.  But it fails at ease of use / familiarity and therefore participation and quick changes/deployment as well.  All other criteria are met but not exceeded.
  
• Confluence.  Excels at Participative and Quick Changes, but fails in many others including Printable, Downloadable, Bundlable.
• APT: Almost Plain Text.  This would seem to achieve everything.  It's basically what I would call an offline Wiki-style formatted text that can be converted to HTML, PDF, RTF and other formats.  It's free (Apache 1.1 style license), easy (it's plain text with some rules), diffable, easy to change/deploy ("automatable") and could be participative (because it's "automatable").  It can output to all of the formats to achieve all user/reader goals.  Is there something I'm missing?  Or does it sound great?  http://www.xmlmind.com/aptconvert.html
  
• Others alternatives I'm forgetting?
  

Thoughts?

Cheers,
Clinton