Creating Documentation and Manuals

Microsoft Word is one of the popular options to create documents. It can be used to create manuals and guides. But as these manuals grow in size and include more images, handling the document becomes more tedious task. Producing PDF version of the document is also not the straight task in Word.
One option available in Open Source is LyX based documentation tools. I found it particularly good at creating bulky and complex documents.
There are more than one software that need to be installed in order to get a working LyX framework. Here are the tools, I used in my setup:

• LyX
  
• MiKTeX
• ImageMagick
• GhostScript

LyX is the main program that uses other tools in background.

The basic difference in working with LyX and other common softwares is the appearience while writing documents. Instead of WYSIWYG, the approach is What You Mean Is What You Get. Normally, the document elements are styled as title, chapter, heading, and so on. Rest of the work is handled by LyX, when it processes and generate the document.