I am wondering if there is software which allows a design document to be a sort of dynamic/living document which can be easily searched/indexed? I'm currently making my design documents in HTML with hyperlinks to the important stuff. I am thinking about making a PHP & MySQL peice of software which allows the developer to browse different sections of their document and edit at will. Does something like this exist already? I can't find anything of the likes on sourceforge or google.

A wiki?

You can do all that rather easily with Microsoft Word. If you set styles in your documents such as headings. You can generate a table of contents or other reference using the style information by clicking on insert->references->indexes and tables tab. These tables allow you to jump to any part of your document with a simple mouse click.

if you something a bit more sophisisticated you can try out Storyspace, or a similar semi-graphical hypertext editor.

http://www.eastgate.com/Storyspace.html

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Original post by Zanthos A wiki?

I second this. If you're running Windows XP Professional (or Win2K) you've already got IIS - it takes about five minutes to download and install QwikiWiki. If not, you can pick up Apache and PHP and then get something like PHPWiki.

I run a wiki on localhost for storing all my ideas in, and it's great.

See IGDA Thread: The Living Design.... wiki?

I am looking for something as well, as I do not have Microsoft Word.
A Wiki sounds good, but what about something portable as I might not be able to install a wiki at every computer I happen to sit in front of.

@slayemin: What html editor do you use? I thought about using html but figured all the color, font, and spacing stuff would get in the way(I really know nothing about this format, or its editors).

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Original post by RolandofGilead I am looking for something as well, as I do not have Microsoft Word. A Wiki sounds good, but what about something portable as I might not be able to install a wiki at every computer I happen to sit in front of. @slayemin: What html editor do you use? I thought about using html but figured all the color, font, and spacing stuff would get in the way(I really know nothing about this format, or its editors).

Instead of the expensive Office Package, you could use the OpenOffice (openoffice.org I think). It has most of the capabilities that Office has.

This is a very interesting thread... living design documents. If software this Wiki stuff really is pretty simple to use, I think I'll set one up and check it out. And encourage other devs in the department to use it. I can see all sorts of good things about having an internal development wiki, just never occured to me before.

Devs are usually quite bad at keeping logbooks and stuff, this could be an excellent way to encourage more and open documentation.

Hmmm...

I mean look at this:
http://www.conitecserver.com/wiki/index.php/FreeTools

something like this to keep code snippets on (follow links back) useful software download links... it's great.

Then again I think Blogging could also be a good for of documentation, though I think Wikis probably have the edge.

RolandofGilead> all your client software would need is a decent browser to do Wikis

If there any software that kind of mixes together both the Wiki and Blog paradigm?

You can setup user-specified pages to act as blogs if your wiki software supports user authentication and page protection.