prawn

I'm a little confused by your comment. I've been using the Prawn library to generate PDFs on the backend for a side project I am working on for quite sometime https://github.com/prawnpdf/prawn (Admittedly, the PDFs I generate are most certainly not beautiful, so maybe that's the difference)

Are you familiar with Prawn [1]? Perhaps I just haven't bumped up against its limitations yet, but in my experience it's exactly what you're asking for. Of course, it's in Ruby, which isn't to everyone's taste, but it's the best tool out there that I've found. [1] https://github.com/prawnpdf/prawn

There are libraries like ruby's prawn[1]. [1] https://github.com/prawnpdf/prawn

I built the site using Ruby on Rails, and ended up trying all the PDF libraries I could find. In the end I had to use six different libraries and tools to solve various problems with parsing or transforming PDFs. The libraries I use are: pdf-reader [1], prawn [2], prawn-templates [3], origami [4], qpdf [5], and pdftk [6]. There's a new PDF library for Ruby called hexapdf [7], and it looks really promising. I think it might even be able to replace all six of these libraries, but it's released under the AGPL license, and commercial licenses are not available yet. [1] https://github.com/yob/pdf-reader [2] https://github.com/prawnpdf/prawn [3] https://github.com/prawnpdf/prawn-templates [4] https://github.com/gdelugre/origami [5] http://qpdf.sourceforge.net/ [6] https://www.pdflabs.com/tools/pdftk-the-pdf-toolkit/ [7] https://hexapdf.gettalon

Our rails app generates dozens of accounting related reports on the fly in HTML and we use Flying Saucer to generate a PDF version - https://github.com/flyingsaucerproject/flyingsaucer To help minimize request time, we keep Flying Saucer persisted with Nailgun - https://github.com/martylamb/nailgun For generating checks, IRS forms and other PDFs that involve precise formatting we use Prawn - https://github.com/prawnpdf/prawn