My company is hiring a contract technical writer to improve our product's documentation. As the maintainer, I'm currently using Google Docs, and very happy with it's collaborative nature (multiple simultaneous editors, web based, comment/response system), ease of use, and ability to produce PDF output.
The technical writing resource needs to create/apply standard styles to our various documents, rework/reduce much of the content (we're software engineers, not writers), add tables of contents and indexes, and allow output to web friendly HTML (while still allowing us to produce PDF). By "web friendly", I mean the standard content on the right with navigation on the left.
Can this all be accomplished using Google Docs? What are the alternatives? I'm concerned with switching to something that isn't cloud based or locks me into a proprietary binary that only runs on Windows or OSX.