PDF Best Practices

[createErrorMsg]

I started working with a client recently on a site to promote and sell his eBook. As part of the contract, he would (reasonably, I think), like for me to handle the creation of the product. I have Adobe Acrobat which I've used in the past for simple PDF creation tasks (invoices, single page downloadables, etc), but I'm unsure which direction to go for this larger PDF project.

What technologies would you say produce the best multi-page PDFs? My default assumption was to markup the eBook with structural HTML, style it with CSS and convert it to PDF, but my initial experiments with this have produced hideous results, especially with page breaking and losing content between pages. I know all about print stylesheets, the browser differences in using them, ect, but these issues seem specific to converting to PDF.

Does anyone have experience with this sort of thing? Would you advise creating the PDF from web markup, or would it be better to use another program - Word, perhaps, or Publisher - to layout the book and create the PDF from there?

Thanks in advance for any input!

cEM

[Jenstar]

I use Word for all my PDF documents, and it converts exactly as it appears in Word. I have converted some html documents, but just wasn't nearly as happy with the results.