writing pdfs

[Don Tyson]

[snipped]

> 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.

If you can write HTML almost as quickly as plain
text you will have absolutely no problem learning
LaTeX markup. 

IMHO the result is so superior to HTML output that
they're not even in the same league, but I'm no
html expert.

The only thing I would add to the excellent replies is that
no one seems to have mentioned the dvipdfm utility,
part of the teTeX package, which generates pdf
directly from your .dvi file;  no need to convert
ps to pdf.

I've never had any problem using the Computer
Modern fonts. 

Don Tyson