Using the Zend_Pdf component of the Zend Framework Jani Hartikainen has created a simple way to make a PDF generator class that uses templates and content arrays/XML to create the new files.

There are some expensive libraries that you can use to generate PDF files...but why bother with them, when there are good free alternatives like Zend_Pdf? [...] Since this is a quite repetitive task, let's also create a PDF generator class to help us. In case you don't have Zend_Pdf, just download Zend Framework to get it.

He shows how to set it up to work with basic PHP arrays to pull the content from as well as an XML structure with the same sort of information. You can download his class here.