Thank you all for your comments on my post.

In my particular situation I wanted to create PDFs from data in a database, so editing the resulted PDFs is not an issue. The idea of creating rich text files though is a good one and I'll probably use it for other parts of the system.

The three main options seem to be produce PDFs directly from the code, produce .tex files and process them with LaTeX, or turn html inte PDFs using something like htmldoc.

I think that what I will do is produce PDFs by translating HTML. The logic for this is that I have to create the HTML anyway for when I display data on the web browser so it seems silly not to simply use the same layouts on the paper. If there is then a situation where doing this is innapropriate then churning out tex files seems a good bet - it very nicely separates the logic and the layout.

Finally I will produce PDFs directly from the code in only very rare situations, for example where I need the greatest control over where text or graphics appears on the page. This will be so specialised that t will be worth the effort of cooking up the code.

My situation is probably quite unique in that I need to produce may different types of paper output and so cannot invest too much time on each one. If I was just producing a single output, say a bill or a certificate then much more time could be justified.

Thank you again for all your input.