JavaScript PDF Generation
I searched for JavaScript PDF generation just to see what server-side technologies are available. I found jsPDF, which works both server-side and in browser. It currently works best in Safari, Firefox 3+ and Opera.
It uses the data URI scheme to send the data to the browser, which is a problem for IE.
The code is easy to follow — if you want to learn about PDF generation it’s interesting to read through. There’s a demo page with usage examples and the resulting PDFs.
Usage looks like this:
var doc = new jsPDF();
doc.text(20, 20, 'Hello world!');
doc.text(20, 30, 'This is client-side Javascript, pumping out a PDF.');
doc.addPage();
doc.text(20, 20, 'Do you like that?');
// Output as Data URI
doc.output('datauri');
jsPDF doesn’t have many options yet — fonts are hardcoded for example (to helvetica). It’s an interesting demonstration of the power of client-side programming though.