writing pdfs

[William O'Higgins]

I have grown tired of using MS Word as my standard document output
format.  I haven't gotten OpenOffice to work under FreeBSD (and it isn't
my favourite tool by a long shot) and I am most happy generating text in
vi.  PDF is eminently portable, and I think that it would suit my
purposes nicely.

I had some thoughts about generating PDFs, but I was hoping for advice
about which tools to use.  Should I just learn how to mark up a text
page manually (I write HTML almost as quickly as plain text)?  Should I
learn TeX or some variant and translate it?  I hear that PHP has some
excellent PDF-generation tools; should I write up a command-line
interpreter myself?  Any suggestions would be appreciated.

I did a bit of searching, but I didn't find any real *advice* on what
process to use, and most of the tools that I found are for viewing PDFs,
not writing them.

Thanks.
-- 

yours,

William