I have a client who needs to put a large volume of brochure-ready technical specifications on both the web and rendered as attractive downloadable as PDFs, in a hopefully machine-readable format. Really curious if LaTeX is ever used as a solution in commercial applications where business users are most familiar with word - or is that the wrong application?
Exporting to HTML via htlatex is possible, but may require a lot of fine-tuning. Depending on the content, it may be easier to generate the LaTeX/PDF and HTML separately, or to generate only parts of the HTML using htlatex.
LaTeX special symbols are much easier to use than UTF8. It is easier to type -- and be sure that you have properly entered -- en-dashes, non-breaking spaces, fractions, degree symbols, directional quotation marks, and other non-keyboard characters.