Does anybody here know anything about Adobe InDesign?

Our product manual is produced with it. The manual has always been the 
most neglected part of our product, so some while ago, management got 
the Graphics department to redo the manual. And by "redo", I mean "make 
it look like a glossy magazine".

The manual is very, very pretty. I can't even explain it in words 
properly. I can't put my finger on *what* exactly is so good about it, 
but it just *looks professional*. It looks really slick. I could have 
wasted hundreds of hours buggering around with formatting commands and 
still not come up with anything remotely this good-looking.

I guess that's what happens when you pay professional graphic artists to 
make your stuff look good!

The trouble is... the actual *content* of the manual is awful. (The 
Graphics department only changed the formatting, not the content.) Half 
of it is three point-releases out of date. There are new features that 
aren't explained anywhere. The manual is huge and intimidating, and very 
poorly organised. The English is poor in many places. Some irrelevant 
things are explained in unnecessary detail, while other important 
information is barely explained at all. In short, it sucks.

We all know it sucks. But it would take a long time for somebody to 
write something better. And there's people banging on the door wanting 
new software features, so...

Anyway, I don't think anybody here actually knows how to *use* InDesign. 
Oh, various people have got it to "work", but I don't think any of us 
know how to use it properly. The Graphics department have built a 
document that looks beautiful, but it's intractably difficult to 
*change* anything. The table of contents was produced by hand (I can 
tell from the inconsistent typos), the running titles on the pages were 
produced by hand, all the cross-references were done manually (several 
of them are incorrect), and so on. It appears that to add a new page, 
you basically copy-paste an existing page and then edit the contents to 
make it different. (And then go edit the page numbers on all the 
succeeding pages.)

What we *really* want to do is put the manual into source control. 
But... well, putting a binary blob into source control doesn't really 
help much. You *can* put a Word document into source control, but it's 
impossible to tell what got changed on each commit, so why bother?

What we actually want to do is write some sort of "source code" which 
contains the textual content of the manual and some markup instructions, 
and then press a button somewhere, and have a glossy magazine drop out 
the other end. Can InDesign do that? Or do we need to find another tool?

(We could use LaTeX - but it makes your document look like a stuffy 
academic publication rather than a trendy commercial product brochure. 
I've been looking into DocBook, but the PDF output looks *awful*! Like, 
even MS Word looks less chunky than this stuff! Perhaps we could use a 
custom XML schema and I could code up some suitable XSLT for it... but I 
very much doubt that my coding skills can match the talent of 
professional graphics designers.)

Everything I've managed to read about InDesign (i.e., not much) says 
it's brilliant for producing posters and flyers. E.g., the product page 
talks about "pixel perfect" design - which is what you want if you're 
designing one poster, once. But I'm not seeing anything about 
automatically processing big chunks of existing text into a pretty 
document. Maybe it can't do that...

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