Lack of documentation is definitely a problem with PDF::Template. The tests that are there show some ideas, but I have to go back to the source to remember how to do stuff.

As for the layout, it's real XML - I use XML::Parser to parse it. The "pseudo" part of it comes from the fact that a childnode has access to the attributes of all its ancestor nodes. This scoping was so that you could specify something in the pdftemplate node (the root), such as H, and have all the children use that as their H. (This feature is actually one part of the performance problem I was speaking of.)