I'm completely astounded that after all these years, there still isn't a good library for creating semi-complex PDF files from PHP.  We've been using DomPDF for a while, which more or less works but is incredibly slow and breaks frequently especially when tables are involved.  I've also tried the HTML2PS / PS2PDF route which is a little more robust but equally slow and produces inferior quality output (and requires system() or exec() calls, which aren't allowed on our servers).  I'm evaluating TCPDF right now, which also seems like a bust.

Besides taking forever to generate a PDF file, one thing I notice is that all of these libraries frequently exhaust the 128MB of RAM allocated to each PHP process.  Even increasing the memory limit to 256MB isn't enough.  How the hell is that possible?  I could see exceeding that amount of RAM if you're making a 300-page document, but we're talking 10 page documents here that are just unordered lists.

I hate to be a naysayer, but this is not good.  PDF is a standard method for distributing documents and it also fills in as a good substitute for the total lack of reliable printing that the web browsers and HTML give us (try printing Avery labels with HTML an Firefox or IE reliably).