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I was writing design documents in ASCII, like this:

Design Document
***************

Weiqi Gao
Wed Nov 17 20:08:10 CST 2004
----------------------------

Introduction
============

The phase two system will have two tiers

  - The business tier
  - The management tier

when Rob showed me AFT.

Rob: Have you used AFT?
Me: What is AFT?
Rob: Almost Free Text. It's like a Wiki. Byron turn me on to it.
Me: I'll give it a try.

AFT turnout to be pretty easy. You write design.aft:

*Title: Design Document
*Author: Weiqi Gao
*TOC

*Introduction

The phase two system will have two tiers

        * The business tier
        * The management tier

then run

[weiqi@gao] $ aft design.aft

to generate design.html:

You can even run

[weiqi@gao] $ aft -type tex design.aft
[weiqi@gao] $ pdflatex design
[weiqi@gao] $ pdflatex design

to generate design.pdf, with navigation tree and hyperlinks:

If you are looking for a lightweight but version controllable (i.e., text not binary) document tool for a project, AFT might fit the bill.