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TCPDF Open-source PDF-reader built in PHP
FPDF Combine with TCPDF above to create a PDF-writer using PHP
SetAssign Not open-source but this company offers both free and paid libraries that combine with the libraries above to allow PDF encryption / decryption using PHP.- The paid versions support more complex ciphers and I swear by them personally


Not sure if you meant desktop software or...

While I realize this is supposed to be an amusing turn of phrase, there are actually quite a few tools out there. A few that I like are:

PDFBox - OSS Library for modifying PDFs on the fly.
FOP - Use XSL-FO to design printable page layouts in XML, then use FOP to transform them to PDF documents.
Foxit Tools - Alternative to the overpriced Adobe products.
OpenOffice - The built-in support for PDFs is absolutely wonderful. I rarely give out DOC files anymore.
FPDF - PHP PDF generation tools.
iText - A great library for your own custom PDF generation.

Those are just a few. The PDF format itself is actually not too bad. (When Adobe isn't breaking it with needless revisions, that is.) It's biggest strength is that the psuedo-text nature of the format allows one to diagnose the internals of a file pretty easily. Its greatest weakness is that things like text fields are needlessly convoluted. At the end of the day, though, it's a pretty good format.

...is open, it was postscript that was license encumbered (IIRC). There exists a multitude of programs that can read and write PDF's.

OpenOffice.org can export to PDF. Evince, gpdf etc. can read them. There are also third-party libraries that output PDF documents (some written in pure PHP, such as FPDF, which wouldn't be as probable without specs.

And creating a PDF via PHP is totally free:

http://www.fpdf.org/

I have used about every PDF library for PHP under the sun, so here's my $0.02.

pdflib - SUCKS, the API is a pain in the ass. I liken it to doing your own dental work -- in the dark. You can circumvent this a little using the pc4p wrapper, but it's fickle.

fpdf - It's pretty good, although it doesn't natively support any sane ways of dealing with text in tables - I was trying to use it to generate PDF invoices and quotations. It would barf and break columns when my text should wrap to the next line. The only way around this would be writing custom extensions to the class.

r&os - This is what I really recommend using. Like fpdf, it doesn't require any additional libraries to be installed - everything runs within PHP itself. The documentation is pretty good and I've really enjoyed using it.

http://www.fpdf.org/ it is a completely contained PDF system for PHP. I haven't used it a lot but I've heard it is a lot more sane to use than PDF Lib plus it doesn't require you to compile in the library.

That is what I was wishing for. I settled for creating a pdf's in PHP using FDFD. If only there was a command line tool to create the pdf's from a OpenOffice file, I could maintain the appearance of the customer's templates.

Instead, I have to create a class file to generate pdf reports with FPDF, taking all the freedom from the client to update their own reports without my help.

You make a very good point.

Can you generate a PDF with PHP without also generating an Adobe lawsuit?

There's no liability shield built in, but FPDF is a great tool that can generate PDFs using PHP without the need for using a commercially-licensed (read "expensive") PDF generating library. I like it because it is distributed under a BSD-like license.

Here's what I use http://www.fpdf.org/ It's a steep learning curve, but it works