Aha, this was a helpful kick in the pants. When I do a simple script as you suggest, everything works swimmingly. So there's something in the home-grown modules in between, that we are using, that's corrupting things. So at least I have a starting point for sleuthing now.

One thing I've noticed in the past, is that I must disable $pdf->{forcecompress} = 0. Sometimes it's okay even with forcecompress left enabled, other times it really scrambles the presentation when displaying via a PDF reader (text enormous or skewed or mispositioned on the page). Turning it off makes it so there's dependable display of the results.

Is that common -- where forcecompress causes issues?