The documentation is actually 100% docbook based. Docbook are converted to SVG for integrated tutorials if I'm not wrong.
The problem is docbook is not the easiest way to make a doc for everyone, and there are lot of people that are not developers and would like to help for some other tasks (as we see lot of good free tutorials around the web and translator in lot of languages).
Actually the manuals are here in Inkscape SVN, there is an English and a French beginning of doc : http://inkscape.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/inkscape/user_manual/trunk/xml/
The doc didn't move since one month, Elisa-Yemanja (that already amade a paper book manual on Inkscape) contributed in French version 2 weeks ago, but think this is too long process to manage docbook.
I think it will be better to use a well defined wiki for manual, as lot of contributors could participate easly as wikimedia projects and some other projects shown. There are already started wikibooks for inkscape on wikibooks.org.
I believe there are 2 conditions for this project to be used: * A well defined zone for the wikimanual doc (like doc.inkscape.org, manual.inkscape.org or inkscape.org/doc), actually user have to dig in wiki to find part of user information. * Tools to convert automatically this wiki to docbook.
I then searched tools to convert from wiki to docbook and from docbook to wiki, and there are several ones: to integrate docbook to wiki (and don't restart the whole documantation) there are scripts made by blender.org (or at least referenced on there wiki) in perl and python : http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Meta/DocBook_to_Wiki
mediawiki project itself contain a php wiki2docbook, available in the mediawiki svn (and archive, I suppose): http://tools.wikimedia.de/~magnus/wiki2xml/w2x.php
Example of conversion to odt et pdf are nice they even contain link to other pages of the manual on the de.wikipedia.org used as example: http://www.nabble.com/Wiki-Konverter-to3627646.html
I suppose we could output to SVG from docbook and change to local disk pages or other site obtaining then a full doc separated distribution (as there is gimp + gimp-doc, python + python-doc, ruby + ruby-doc, ...) or choose to make links to generated svg doc on inkscape site or both, to have well done manual for users with interactive features as actual tutorials. I think tutorial is good as is light, allowing a quicktour to Inkscape, the doc should be another documentation separated from inkscape itself, at least in a first time.
There are other wiki2XML in Perl (including docbook converter) here: http://search.cpan.org/search?query=wikiformat&mode=all
General wiki format, Text::Wikiformat : http://search.cpan.org/~chromatic/Text-WikiFormat-0.79/lib/Text/WikiFormat.p...
And specialized mediawiki format Text::MediawikiFormat: http://search.cpan.org/author/DPRICE/Text-MediawikiFormat-0.05/lib/Text/Medi...
CGI::Kwiki and Pod::Simple::Wiki are other Perl parser.
There is to dig here for Python parsers/converters: http://pypi.python.org/pypi?%3Aaction=search&term=wiki+docbook&submi...
A Ruby converter from wiki to docbook (and other) : http://rubyforge.org/projects/deplategem/ Ruby wiki parsers : http://rubyforge.org/search/?type_of_search=soft&words=wiki+docbook&...
Regards,
Popolon