Looking for a good documentation format [closed]

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I have a quite big hobby project and I'm trying not to get lost so I'm off course documenting, might it be "design docs" or "manuals" but I haven't yet found a good format, all my docs are spread out in .txt .doc .odt etc, maybe you can help me out :-) ?

The really best would be a format with:

• One file only (not html for example)
• Easy to add images, big/small/bold/underlined/... texts.
• Simple to use (no need to 'compile', no need for a gas-powered-editor / simplici开发者_运维百科ty to edit)
• A collapsible 'index' preferably on the left side
• Can be (easily) read on several computers (PC is a must but it would be nice if it works on Mac etc.)
• Free or not very expensive (at least a free and good reader)

I have already tried .odt, powerpoint and .pdf but they have obvious issues (odt: no index, ptt: expensive and PC only, pdf: has it all I think but no (good) free editor ).

What do you use when you are documenting and do you have an idea about a format that would suit me?

Thanks!

[edit] Actually I found out that Open Office text document using different titles and exported to pdf automatically makes bookmarks (for the titles, collapsible too) so that is what I searched for. As the question got closed with only one answer (thanks! but it wasn't what I was looking for) I can't answer my question and I'll just let it be...

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Have you tried Markdown? That's how I write all of my lengthy articles and such, as Markdown is extremely readable by itself (that's the whole point) and can be edited via any text editor. But with a template engine (I use Jinja2), you can spit out uniform groups of text documents quite well.

• Here's a sample article written in Markdown.
• And the resulting HTML file.
• And the global template file.

If you want to see some examples of the syntax, Wikipedia has a nice article on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Markdown#Syntax_examples.