creating good-looking PDF documents

[Lorenzo Donati <lorenzodonatibz@...>]

Hi List!

I'd like to create good-looking PDF documents using data obtained from 
Lua (parsing and processing various data sources).

The documents I want to produce should allow (possibly nested) tables 
with borders, embedded images and text with different fonts.

The approach I tried was to create an HTML file from Lua (to be later 
"printed" with PDFCreator to generate the PDFs), but the results were 
disappointing: the html files were rendered quite differently depending 
on the browser (especially tables with borders) and the spacings were a 
pain to get right (the tables did really look ugly).

I chose HTML+CSS because it is very easy to generate from Lua and I 
already know it somewhat, although I'm not a master, but now I fear that 
my choice was a wrong one, so I wonder whether a different document 
format or approach could be more suitable.

I'd like something which is not too difficult to learn (I don't know PDF 
format, but I gathered that it wouldn't be easily generated from Lua).

Maybe I should use some simple formats (XML based? I could cope with XML 
if its format is not too complex) and then convert it to PDF with some 
tool (please, consider that only free tools are viable for me)?

I thought I could generate an ODT file (open document text - as in 
openoffice), but its internal format is quite a mess (I collected some 
info on how to do that, but it's rather cumbersome and seems to require 
quite a long time commitment).

I hope there is a better and simpler alternative.
Ideally all tools should be amenable to be carried away on a portable 
HD, since I may be needed to generate the documents on computers (using 
Windows XP as OS) different from my usual workstation, and where I could 
not install new software.


Any suggestion or pointer greatly appreciated!
Thank you very much in advance.
--
Lorenzo