Database driven document creation

Your ultimate solution will probably involve a mixture of:

-- Database or content management system
-- Output filters and formatting templates

Most important, you want to have a "write once, publish many" process. In other words, you need to store the master data in your database, and then have various formatting filters through which you export into whatever medium is the target.

Be careful not to get too tightly bound to one particular output format because that may change. Ideally, the same master data could output to PDF, the Web, a printed book, etc. Each medium will have different format needs, such as page size, font size, column width, etc. Since formats always change over time, you want consistent master data and leave all formatting information to the output filter.

In the old days, SGML was the "universal translator" to accomplish device-independent publishing. These days, it will likely be an XML-based system.

In general, increasing independence between the data and the output format gives you greater flexibility, but at higher cost. Therefore, this becomes a tradeoff decision as you design the solution process.