One thing I try to do from time to time is clean up old content on my sites. Because of this, I find gems of knowledge I forgot I had and should share with the wider programming communities. This is just such a case.

A while back I was tasked with writing a program that took content out of a database and reformat it as a PDF document with a specific layout. I found this nice CPAN module for perl called PDF::API2 which allows you to write PDFs on the fly. After some database giggery pokery I had a program in place that created the 500 PDF files in about 2 min.

After I wrote the program I wanted to address the complete lack of documentation for the module. I ended up writing an article that never got linked anywhere. I am correcting that issue now and hopefully this will help someone else with a similar problem.