Need a simple report generator with a designer?

Question

PHP

There is an online store engine in php (more precisely, PrestaShop). You need to make several reports - payments, receipts, etc. The output should be PDF. The current approach of the engine is not very rational - it takes FPDF and creates a document from scratch in the code. I think that typing in code is a perversion.
I would like to simplify my life and make up a report template in a more convenient environment. I see two options:
1) Take report generators with a designer. Something like BIRT or JasperReports . The PHP script generates XML with the data and feeds it to an external application that builds the report. But this is clearly a cannon on sparrows - for the sake of several one-page reports, I don’t want to deal with these JavaEE monsters.
2) Type up a report in a word processor or spreadsheet. So that the output would be doc, rtf, xls with placeholders like {name}. {amount}. PHP generates the necessary data, and gives it to a certain mechanism that substitutes variables into documents and generates PDF. It seems like PHPExcel can do something similar . but I don't know how live and bug-free the project is.
the code is spinning on VPS, so I can install any necessary software.
Share your experience, how did you solve this problem ...

Answer 1

Maybe this will help a little github.com/djpate/docxgen + some docx2pdf

Answer 2

try code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/