A Product Document Constraint Specification Language (PDCSL) is provided for a document author to represent various types of documentation guidelines that must be enforced within documents or across different documents. A Document Constraint Analyzer (DCA) takes as input a set of document files together with a document constraint specification file, extracts and examines the contents, attributes, and relationships associated with the document objects, and evaluates the logical expressions specified in the document constraints. If a document constraint is not satisfied, an action can be taken to correct the documents or provide an explanation to the document author.