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