> Can the tex info format do all this? Is the DocBook format better?
or
> others?
For all the reasons you described I think DocBook is the best
choice. There is a quick guide for using DocBook under Debian at:
http://france.fsfeurope.org/server/wrap-publish.en.html#DocBook%20Quick%20Start
Creating snipets (for online help for instance) is a lot
easier with DocBook since one can write XSLT scripts to extract the
desired data and add elements or attributes for this purpose. The only
pitfall to carefully avoid with DocBook is over complexifying the
document and schema descriptions ;-)
Since texinfo is the document format of choice for GNU
projects
we need to generate texinfo from DocBook. Luckily, there is a program
to do this although I don't currently remember its name.