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I agree with a few of the posts that claim you are
describing FrameMaker. You might look at Nissus, but it's
kind or rare these days. It actually (as I recall) is a
very powerful package, and very command oriented - sort of
tuned to people who think more like emacs than Word. Or so
I believe. But it has sort of fallen to the way-side.
However, I think it might still exist. Not sure if they
cover all platforms.
I don't see why you think Maker is too specialized, though.
You can limit or modify the menus, set up palette docs to
bring commands to the surface, and a well designed template
practically formats itself. I believe you can even set up
the template browser to list your custom templates. I have
worked in a few environments where Maker was used by
engineers, and they were perfectly happy with it. For
longer specs, books were especially handy... They
facilitated collaboreative writing.
In one instance, I set up an HTML site that tracked hundreds
of documents. To get at docs to edit, I generated MIF
documents with hypertext links to the source files, so
everything could be done from the browser.
