PDF Printing App Server

I'm getting ready to build an application server that handles PDF printing and archiving.

Currently options are:

1. Move my existing infrastructure over (webkit printer + file merge scripts, etc) Pro: All open source or custom written. Con: inefficient memory usage. Not quite as stable as we would like.

2. Move to an enterprise system (Adobe LiveCycle PDF Generator ES2.) Very Expensive. ($20k-$40k)

Q: Is there a pdf printing system that you use, that works well without being as expensive as LiveCycle? There doesn't seem to be a decent 'small business' 开发者_运维问答solution.

Will be running on a linux box. This will also need to take html, images, and pdf's as inputs -- have already looked at a lot of the open source ones, but I'm looking for something a little more reliable.

You might want to check out iText.

EDIT: Not sure that my second recomendation will work on your platform, but I'm leaving it just in case.

I've had great success with the products from Aspose. I do a lot of automated generation and printing of documents in MS Word format wtih their tools. As part of one of my processes I also generate PDF's and the rendering has been flawless. While my implementation has been tied in with their Word product I know they have stand-alone PDF products.

I see this question has an accepted answer, but thought it worth mentioning Docmosis since it seems to meet your requirements for PDF generation including low memory usage, stability, performance, platform and pricing. As with iText you will have some coding to do, but in iText you layout the document in code, in Docmosis you use a document template.
I've used, both in serious business applications and they are both very handy for creating PDFs.