Using illustrator for technical documents, heavy text

Hi,
First, apologies for the total noob question. I'm sort of at a loss.
A technical writing instructor recommended Illustrator to me for creating all of the technical documentation for my company. Essentially we have documentation in many forms, but mostly already on our website. I'm trying to migrate this material, mostly text, from the site and into an Illustrator document (essentially copying and pasting, formatting later). Well, I am sure I don't have to tell anyone here, but it's a struggle to get text into an artboard, muchless to the point where it's easy to manipulate.
Can anyone point me in a better direction? I have a lot of books, and have been googling all day, but so far I'm not having any success. I feel like I should be able to figure this out.
Did we buy the wrong software for the job?
My sincere thanks for what I can only assume is a somewhat irritating post.

function(){return A.apply(null,[this].concat($A(arguments)))}
Did we buy the wrong software for the job?
For text-intensive documents of more than a few pages length, yes.
function(){return A.apply(null,[this].concat($A(arguments)))}
Essentially we have documentation in many forms, but mostly already on our website.
LM, this doesn't help. What does that mean? What "forms"? When you say most are "already on our website" do you mean they are merely posted as downloadable links, or are the web pages themselves the documents?
For anyone to advise you correctly, they would need to know what kind of content you are dealing with. Instead of creating guessing games, can you post a link to the website?
For example: Did you know that Adobe Acrobat Pro can automate the creation of PDFs directly from a web site, including functioning links?
JET

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