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Topic : Can Google Docs be used for technical product documentation? My company is hiring a contract technical writer to improve our product's documentation. As the maintainer, I'm currently using Google - selfpublishingguru.com

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My company is hiring a contract technical writer to improve our product's documentation. As the maintainer, I'm currently using Google Docs, and very happy with it's collaborative nature (multiple simultaneous editors, web based, comment/response system), ease of use, and ability to produce PDF output.

The technical writing resource needs to create/apply standard styles to our various documents, rework/reduce much of the content (we're software engineers, not writers), add tables of contents and indexes, and allow output to web friendly HTML (while still allowing us to produce PDF). By "web friendly", I mean the standard content on the right with navigation on the left.

Can this all be accomplished using Google Docs? What are the alternatives? I'm concerned with switching to something that isn't cloud based or locks me into a proprietary binary that only runs on Windows or OSX.

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Google Docs is fairly limited in its word-processing feature set. It has a very basic set of styles which can be applied to text. From what I can see there is no way to change the list of styles although you can customize how they appear.

It allows export to .doc, .pdf, and several other formats and has a "publish to the web" feature which you can see in action here. This probably isn't what you want, so there's also an export to html which presumably allows you to host the document somewhere else.

There doesn't seem to be any control over how the navigation appeears on the publish-to-web version. Publishing to web and publishing on paper are fairly different tasks and Gdocs seems to be designed with a paper-first model.

Gdocs are fine for basic document editing and collaborative document editing but they lack many important features for advanced users. I suspect you will be disappointed. However, it may be possible to export your data from gdocs to some other tool, especially if you have programmers on hand to massage the output.

As for it being cloud-based: I'm going to suggest that you already have a "cloud" where you can store your documents: your version control system.

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