We all know that "the web is not print". That is to say that HTML-formatted documents and their cousins are NOT meant for printing in a paginated fashion as are StarOffice docs, and so forth. Though I've tried time and again to pound this fact into the brains of coworkers and clients alike, sooner or later they all still demand that I take abstract data in one form or another and create a miracle by which this data can be printed in a nicely formatted and paginated document.

More details: I've got a database which contains several tables making up a telephone directory for the company. It's got all the bells and whistles for doing lookups on various criteria and works fantastic through the browser. But now I'm told that they also want to be able to take all of the telephone directory contents and print it in a nicely formatted office-like document.

Here's where I get to the perl-related stage: does anyone know of ways to take data like this and use a Perl module that can create paginated documents? Or am I really up the creek without a paddle?

Thanks for reading.