I also think there is nothing wrong in letting the webserver handle the PDF download. If you must deliver the download by your script itself your may use File::Temp to create temporay files, read them and deliver them.

I create PDFs using the command line tool wkhtmltopdf. My webapp constructs some HTML temporary file that wkhtmltopdf converts into a nice pdf file which I then deliver.

In reply to Use temp files, give wkhtmltopdf a try by mcsonique
in thread Finding the right PDF module by ksublondie

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