At first glance Confluence looks like a very promising tool for collaborative authoring of documentation of all sorts. Unfortunately most documentation will ultimately need to be exported to a hard-copy. Confluence offers PDF and Word (HTML actually) export. Both option fall short due to a poor support for a proper page-numbered table of contents — a must for any document exceeding 10 pages.
The direct PDF option seems to be quite hopeless in this regard. It seems unrealistic to expect the PDF export to add section numbering, page numbers and a table of contents.
The Microsoft Word export does not seem as far fetched when coupled with a style template but my experience with Word is that it would need a considerable manual intervention for things like page breaks.
LaTeX export seems to be the ideal solution and I am hard-pressed to see what obstacles might arise. TOC should be easy enough, as would section numbers. LaTeX is likely to do a great job paginating. LaTeX would obviously be given direct access to any LaTeX markup in the Confluence source. International characters should be a cinch.
Please implement LaTeX export.
Just to clarify, it is not that LaTex support itself would be a bad thing, it is a matter of weighing up where to spend our precious developer resources. This is driven by the usage patterns that we see amongst our customers and the demand for such issues as
CONF-2079.