in reply to Create PDF from Perl

I have had a great deal of success with the PDF-Reuse module. To use it, you would first export the Word documents to PDF files (there are free tools to do that). Then you use PDF::Reuse to load a PDF as a template and overlay text from the database. You select a font, and a colour and then position some text at specific XY coordinates that coincide with the boxes on the form.