By far and away the current best "free" method of generating a PDF file is to import the text into Open Office, formatting the content to be much more book-like, and exporting the PDF file. Acrobat Pro certainly does better (Adobe wrote the spec, so they understand it better), but as you said, not everybody on Wikibooks can afford that software.
I think htmldoc and scribus are two other interesting ways to export to PDF. htmldoc is great for converting HTML -> PDF, either on the commandline or with a GUI. Scribus is more for taking content and formatting it for publication ala Desktop Publishing. Scribus does a great job of exporting to PDF.
htmldoc and scribus are both GPL
adam
-- Robert Horning
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