Pardon me if I'm posting stupid questions!

I'd like to be able to author software manuals that render either as online HTML or PDF. Now, I'm a hacker from way back, and even wrote High School and undergrad papers in "runoff" (similar to nroff, a pre-LaTex beastie). But I don't consider hand-coding HTML or XML a good way to create documents, especially ones where you want nicely formatted tables, chapter pages, cover pages, etc. WYSIWYG editing arrived for the masses in the late 80s and I'd rather not go back.

So, is PrinceXml the right tool for me? Clearly not by itself. Recommendations on an authoring tool? Or should I be looking elsewhere?

And how would you compare Prince to Apache Forrest?

There are XML and HTML editors, and some are even partially WYSIWYG, like the nvu editor.

Personally I find that for many documents a separation of content and style ends up being more practical in the long run than a WYSIWYG approach. For example, when writing a book, authors just write the text and are not expected to choose fonts and page margins or even page size; the style of the book is determined later in the publication process, and can be changed for subsequent editions of the book without modifying the source text.

As for Apache Forrest, it seems like another web publishing framework similar to Apache Cocoon, in which content can be pushed through pipelines of filters and transformations. Prince is a formatter that takes web content (XML, HTML, CSS) and produces PDF documents from it.

It would probably be possible to include Prince as the last processing step in a web publishing framework. For example, you might take some data from a relational database, turn it to XML, pass it through some transforms and templates until it is in the form of a document that you wish to publish, then pass the document to Prince to turn into a PDF file to return to the browser or archive somewhere.