Having documented a lot in LaTeX (back in the old days at the university), GuideXML (Gentoo's document markup language) and DocBook (Linux Sea) I'm now pointing my arrows at DITA, the Darwin Information Typing Architecture.

DITA "forces" the technical writer in separating the content of his document in specialized subjects: reference, task or concept, or a specialized version of any of those which you can create/define yourself.

By separating content in those three subjects, you can more easily manage your technical documentation (write concepts as individual topics, tasks as end-user procedures and references for affiliated topics or command information).

Once all these documents are written, you bind them together using a DITA map (a metadocument which holds references to all related concepts/tasks/references) et voila: your documentation is ready.

Well, not really, you need to build it to something end users can read - you can use dita-ot for that. It supports building for Eclipse Infocenter, RTF, XHTML and PDF out of the box.