adam hyde wrote:
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
As I said, doing something like this is an excellent first draft if you are trying to design a book. But if you think this is going to be something acceptable in a classroom compared to commercially published textbooks, I think the results are going to be absolutely horrid from an aesthetic viewpoint. It simply can't be automated without either an incredible amount of additional effort and significiant advances in artificial intelligence, or involving some grey matter from volunteers to make it look nice. Perhaps some other software applications can be used, and if you like them, have fun! I'm not suggesting that Open Office is the only one to use, but it is something that many individuals may already have or be using, is available under multiple operating systems, has a very simple installation path, and is also open source. That is a tough combination to try and beat.
BTW, thanks for suggesting Scribus. I'll have to download it and try it out.
--Robert Horning