title: Make PDF reports in Perl?
body: <p>All the PDF libraries for Perl seem a bit barbaric -- stuck in the 1980's. You have to specify PostScript points to do layout. Java has JasperReports, Ruby has Prawn, and Python has ReportLab. Is there a non-extinct library/module that will let me make a nice looking PDF in less than a week of coding? (I'm a little frustrated by PDF::API2, PDF::Table, etc.) I don't want to generate HTML and convert it. Perl is ideal for reporting, but the main report file format is not available in a usable way. What libraries do people use?</p>
  
  <p>I need:</p>
  
  <ul>
  <li>tables  </li>
  <li>charts (Images)</li>
  <li>color</li>
  <li>formatting (ideally automatic, not pixel by pixel)</li>
  <li>headers / footers</li>
  </ul>
  
  <p>I'm slightly open to wrapping external (non-Perl) open source tools, if absolutely needed. But not really interested in a major Java server approach. For the bounty, I want a pure Perl approach, since I want to run this on a server that I can't add more than modules to. If you have a public example that works well, please point me to it.</p>