convert a html book to a pdf file?

Question

How can I convert a html book (consisting of a number of html files linked to each other) to a pdf file on Ubuntu?

Hope the resulting pdf file can have bookmarks according to the structures of the html book.

The html book can be downloaded from here. Extract it, and go to help, and the directory manual is the html book.

Answer 1

You can use chrome headless

wget https://dl.google.com/linux/direct/google-chrome-stable_current_x86_64.rpm
yum localinstall google-chrome-stable_current_x86_64.rpm
./chrome --headless --no-sandbox --disable-gpu --print-to-pdf index.html

Answer 2

Just use wkhtmltopdf

https://github.com/wkhtmltopdf

On my Fedora:

• install via

  dnf install wkhtmltopdf 
  

• use as

  wkhtmltopdf in.html out.pdf
  

Answer 3

First off, not sure I can get the bookmarks and such made automatically, as nice as that would be.

You can manually add them, though, afterwards.

Try opening the HTML file in firefox, and going to file -> print (ctrl+p). Then, click "Print to File" and click 'PDF'. Then type your file name and select the folder to save it in.

If you want to automate it, maybe you want wkhtmltopdf? To install it (in ubuntu or debian or linuxmint or similar), type:
sudo apt-get install wkhtmltopdf

Answer 4

You can use package htmldoc, which is much easier to get working than pandoc. It takes a list of html files and resolves the hyperlinks between them to produce a single pdf with working links, and includes the images.

htmldoc $(find help/manual -name '*html' | sort) --outfile  /tmp/out.pdf

Of course, it would help to know in what order to collate the html files. I just sorted them on name.

Unfortunately, on my fedora 20 I got core dumps when I tried to put more than half the audacity files through at the same time. I got to 440 pages of output though. Perhaps just not enough memory. YMMV.

Remember for safety to prefer the real audacity web site or your OS package manager rather than sourceforge.

Answer 5

Some other alternatives:

weasyprint - more up to date and better support for print css commands than something like wkhtmltopdf

pagedjs / pagedjs-cli - similar; uses headless chromium in the backend, but abstracts away some of the difficulties

I recommend reading this tutorial at print-css.rocks, which summarizes a bunch of methods.

Answer 6

You probably alredy have Libreoffice installed so you already have the tool at hand. Here is how:

$ libreoffice --headless --norestore --convert-to pdf:writer_pdf_Export MY_HTML_FILE.html

If you use windows just replace libreoffice for the equivalent .exe file ( probably libreoffice.exe ).

If you dont have libreoffice installed just go to libreoffice.org for instructions on how to install it.

On unbutu $ sudo apt install libreoffice

Answer 7

I have print to pdf a bunch of html files using "chromium headless" (the chrome base browser).

chromium --headless --disable-gpu --print-to-pdf=./${filename}.pdf --no-margins ./${filename}.html

A bash script to do the job:

#!/usr/bin/env bash

for files in $(ls . )
do
    filename=`echo $files | cut -d. -f1`
    chromium --headless --disable-gpu --print-to-pdf=./${filename}.pdf --no-margins ./${filename}.html
done