Documentation newbie; SGML how-to?

[Nathan Vidican]

Can someone point me to a good RTFM link?

I've written several tutorials in the past, and tutored quite a few 
people over the years and would like to start contributing some of my 
work back to the community who prompted it in the first-place. I've been 
an active member of questions at freebsd.org for several years now, and 
would like to think my contributions could help further answer a lot of 
questions brought about on this list. Rather than continuing to do so on 
my own, and in my own way... I figured why not join in and help out with 
some 'real' documentation.

However, that being said - most of my documentation is in miss-managed 
HTML or ASCII tutorials, spread out across webservers here and there for 
various companies or clients I've worked for. I'd like very much to 
adopt the same type of universal format used in the FreeBSD handbook, 
and re-write these tutorials to be not only informative, but also 
consistent in their documentation conventions and general appearance.

Herein lies the new challenge for me; what documentation tools are 
everyone using to generate documents the likes of the FreeBSD FAQ and 
Handbook? From what I understand it's SGML, (a new language to me - but 
no fears there), but what authoring tools are out there; what's best to 
use? What's easiest to get along with, and is there a collection or 
package one can utilize for stylesheets, templates, etc? Are indexes and 
HTML output generated by hand, or manually? etc...

So, long story short - where do I get started; any good tutorials, 
tools, templates reccomended for SGML documentation? Something along the 
lines of 'if one were to submit a section to the handbook, what 
tools/format should one do so in?' Anything you can offer would be 
greatly appreciated.

Thank-you

--
Nathan Vidican
nvidican at wmptl.com
Windsor Match Plate & Tool Ltd.
http://www.wmptl.com/