convert a html book to a pdf file?

Just use wkhtmltopdf

https://github.com/wkhtmltopdf

On my Fedora:

• install via

  dnf install wkhtmltopdf 
  

• use as

  wkhtmltopdf in.html out.pdf
  

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

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.

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