Re: The PDF generator on the toolserver has implications for quality control on a per-chapter basis

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