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    <p>The short answer is 'No' as LaTeX is the incumbent and quite good at its job. It's also free, so there is relatively little commercial incentive to attempt to replace it. In fact, TeX is sufficiently good at technical publishing that the commercial market for technical publishing tools is rather squeezed between TeX at the 'geek' end and word at the 'great unwashed' end.</p> <p>The longer answer is 'There are alternatives'. LaTeX and other packages suffer heavily from <a href="http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">leaky abstraction</a> issues and often require technical intervention to get what you want out of it. This puts you in the business of understanding how it works behind the scenes, which is actually fairly technical. Thus, you can only really use it for non-casual applications if you have access to someone with that level of technical skill. Writing a report or book is fine. Building a single-source technical documentation workflow with LaTeX is quite a different proposition - you will need access to someone with a technical skill base.</p> <p><strong>Alternatives to LaTeX</strong></p> <ul> <li><p>Commercial technical publication tools. There is really only one left standing: <a href="http://tryit.adobe.com/uk/framemaker/?sdid=DTBUI" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Framemaker</a>. This is a mature product but somewhat stagnant. However, it does have an open document and segment interchange format called <a href="http://help.adobe.com/en_US/FrameMaker/8.0/mif_reference.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">MIF</a>, a comprehensive API and extensive support for structured documentation. It's quite widely used in aerospace circles (for example) where reference documents for aircraft run to tens of thousands of pages. Additionally, there are several also-rans in this space: <a href="http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satellite/us/en/Product/1152105061811#tabview=tab0" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Ventura Publisher</a>, <a href="http://www.ptc.com/products/arbortext/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Arbortext</a> (which is based on a TeX derived back-end IIRC), and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interleaf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Interleaf</a>, which is now known as Quicksilver.<br> Adobe <a href="http://www.adobe.com/products/indesign/features/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">claim</a> to be implementing technical publishing functionality in <a href="http://www.adobe.com/products/indesign/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">InDesign</a> but I have not really evaluated its capabilities for this.</p></li> <li><p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lout_%28software%29" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Lout</a> A markup language with a completely different underlying architecture to TeX. I've never worked with Lout but I believe that it is somewhat easier to work on behind the scenes than TeX.</p></li> <li><p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groff_%28software%29" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Troff/Groff.</a> Originally designed for technical documentation within AT&amp;T during the 1970s (actually a spinoff of the UNIX R&amp;D work), it's still quite widely used for this today. For quite a long time most if not all O'Reilly books were typeset using it.</p></li> <li><p><a href="http://www.docbook.org/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">DocBook</a>. This is an XML tag based format for structure documentation, and tends to work by rendering through foreign engines. I've never used DocBook, so I can't really comment on its usage in practice.</p></li> <li><p><a href="http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satellite/us/en/Product/1151523326841#tabview=tab4" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Wordperfect</a>. This is a venerable word processing system that is considerably better at documentation-in-the-large than MS-Word. Although viewed as something of an also-ran it retains several niche markets such as law offices and is reasonably good (at least significantly better than Word) for large, complex and heavily cross-referenced documents.</p></li> <li><p><a href="http://office.microsoft.com/en-gb/word/FX100487981033.aspx" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Microsoft Word</a>. Not recommended for serious technical publication tasks due to its instability on complex documents. However, as often as not it is the only choice due to political constraints. Indexing is especially painful.</p></li> </ul> <p><strong>EDIT:</strong> See <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/371654/application-not-a-markup-language-for-producing-a-user-manual#372017">this Stackoverflow post</a> for a more in-depth rundown on Framemaker and other technical documentation tools. It's an answer to a question about technical documentation tools for someone who specifically didn't want to use a markup language based system.</p>
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    1. POIs a successor for TeX/LaTeX in sight?
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    1. COWP&Word: not to mention that documents created with both look *ugly*
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    2. COWord 2007 with mathtype can create tex format. And take it in, also.
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    3. COThat doesn't really absolve word from its other sins - Word (in particular) has many flaws that make it somewhat fraught to use for large technical documents.
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