When I was writing my book (didn't get published, long story), I started 
life in DocBook.  About halfway through I switched it over to latex.  The 
main reason was speed: latex could format ~200 pages of text in 
approximately 1/10th the time that docbook could format ~30 pages of text. 
Also, latex was easier for me to write- on the other hand, I'm a greybeard 
who was writing raw docbook and latex in vi, so take that with a grain of 
salt.

For the record, it's not that effin hard to learn latex.  If you can learn 
HTML, you can learn latex.  OK, some of the deep magic is hard, but you 
hardly ever even want to do the deep magic, and never need to (and really, 
is figuring out all the different ways javascript is broken on different 
browsers that easy?).

On Wed, 4 Nov 2009, Jay Austad wrote:

> Here's what I'm looking for in a documentation solution:
> - Version control for multiple authors, maybe even on a per section
> basis so multiple people can work on a document at one time.  A single
> LaTeX document can be split up into multiple files, so it has that
> going for it
> - Offline editing.  I can check out a document or section of a
> document, edit it, and then check it back in once I get connected back
> to the net.

These two requirements are both requirements of the version control 
system- it sounds like you want a distributed version control system, like 
mercurial or git.

> - The ability to create a standard outline for different types of
> documents that is dynamically prepopulated with reusable content from
> a version control system or database
> - The ability to *FORCE* styles for different parts of the document
> (e.g. Text in a paragraph is ALWAYS a certain font and size and cannot
> be changed unless the author changes the stylesheet)

Not sure this is possible, with either docbook or latex.  Especially if 
you're dealing with a greybeard like me, who is quite willing to dig into 
the internals of the system, write his own macros, and do everything in 
vi.  You could write a program that parses the document looking for "dicey 
constructs" and issue a warning.

Brian