I'm putting together an administration system for a school and I need to generate a whole load of paper output - how best should I do this?

The system has a web front end but printing out HTML pages won't cut it. The paper output must be elegant and repeatable. It will range from forms for corrections and update information through to end of year reports on the children.

Preferably the output will be as PDFs - this makes them nice and easy to handle - which can then be printed by the user through their browsers. There will also be a need for some mass printing directly from the server. I have played with using HTML (not controllable enough), LaTeX (slightly awkward due to production of files etc) and with PDFLib (very slow to create the code but blissful to work with once done).

In summary I want something which will create pretty controllable output on paper without too much hassle with writing the code to create it. Does anyone have any suggestions, has anyone solved this problem already?

In reply to Pretty output on paper - how best to do it? by EvdB

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