generating PDF's via code - looking for ideas

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Thu, Sep 30, 2010 at 09:54:17 -0600,
  list user <cs_dba at consistentstate.com> wrote:
> Hi All;
> 
> I'm looking for a way to generate a PDF report based on a set of data in a
> database and a set of pre-generated graphs via some sort of procedural
> method based on a template.
> 
> We tried to do this via open office & it's templating features but this
> process requires us to first generate an odt file based on xml and then open
> the open office odt file and export to a PDF, unfortunately our first stab
> generated a 150GB odt file. This is of course an unacceptable method. So,
> I'm looking for a way to generate PDF's straight away as described above.
> Anyone have any ideas?

I have seen projects (e.g. Postgres) use a docbook tool chain for building
pdf documents. Would that be a usable approach for you?