How to make professional looking technical datasheets?

Question

What publishing tools / workflows do established electronics companies use to produce their technical datasheets? (see examples [0] [1] [2].)The big companies each maintain their own style for text, block diagrams, timing diagrams, tabular data, and mathematical formulas across thousands of documents with numerous authors. What kind of tech are they using to enforce the style consistencies? Custom document build system? In-house SVG diagram generators? Are these kinds of tools for sale anywhere? Or would you need a print media team to polish the engineer's output according to a rigid style guide?What kind of system could a small team adopt to be able to generate docs and graphics with this kind of brand consistency?[0]: https://www.analog.com/media/en/technical-documentation/data-sheets/3824fh.pdf[1]: https://ww1.microchip.com/downloads/en/DeviceDoc/MCP9808-0.5C-Maximum-Accuracy-Digital-Temperature-Sensor-Data-Sheet-DS20005095B.pdf[2]: https://docs.xilinx.com/v/u/en-US/ds190-Zynq-7000-Overview

elevation · Accepted Answer

I asked because documents produced in MS Word have an unprofessional smell to them, especially when they use Word's defaults line spacing, line length and fonts. Also, style discrepancies eventually creep in as you generate more documents.LaTeX provides better typesetting defaults than Microsoft word, but it fails as a publishing tool. It's trivial to typeset the text, but if you try to emulate the layout of a reference datasheet it's an uphill battle to layout graphics where you want them. No doubt LaTeX could be made to work but is it the tool that established documentation teams are reaching for?

WolfOliver · Answer

If you have something which requires a sophisticated layout then Adobe InDesign. If you have long linear text with footnotes, references, cross references, then have a look at MonsterWriter