A completely different (and, non-Perl) strategy would be to prepare the data as an XML file, then use an XSLT stylesheet (adapted from an off-the-shelf one) to transform that into a PDF document. This approach would remove the handling from Perl source-code and move it into the XSLT stylesheet document. Building programs to produce documents can send you down a rabbit hole of ever-growing program complexity. This alternative moves that complexity out to a stylesheet file and industry standard XML validation and transform tools. "DocBook," which is how O'Reilly produces all those books with animals on the cover, is a demonstration of just what XSLT can do, and it might do well for you to take a close look at that possibility.