Question about preparation of documents.

[Satyam]

Dear List,
I need to prepare some documents.
The documents type include:
Pdf documents, technical documents, Microsoft rich text format and other
types of documents using mark up languages like html xml etc.
I came to know that Latex can be used to prepare all kind of documents.
but my question is
How to preview the appearance of these documents?
are there any text based programs    that give what you see what you get
effect?
Thanks in advance.
hope to hear from you.
Satyam.