Uses for Cocoon

[Shawn Church]

I've developed a web-based engineering change-management application which gathers various information from users across the organization.  One of it's purposes is to provide a summary page of all the pertinent information and to present it online in generally the same format as an existing printed paper form including rectangular boxes, checkboxes, signature lines, etc.  This paper form has of course traditionally been filled in by hand.    My html-based representation is pretty good, but I would like to provide a feature to convert this summary information to a .pdf file which can be distributed, printed, archived, etc.  I'm using the Velocity templating engine for the page generation, and I'm not interested in converting the whole site to XML.  My goal is just an on-the-fly .pdf generation of this one summary document.    Is Cocoon overkill or even appropriate for this sort of application?  If not, does anyone have any suggestions?  I've used Etymon in the past, and I've also developed my own ANSI C-based .pdf generator (not really appropriate here), so I'm reasonably familiar with the structure of .pdf documents.   I've never used Cocoon, but I've read through some of the documentation and have kept it in mind for the past year or so for various other applications.  Even though the usage documentation seems fairly thorough, I don't have a clear understanding of what types of applications it is best suited for.  Can anyone provide any case studies or real-world examples of it's implementation?   Shawn