We're creating a CD-ROM that will be distributed for use on MS Windows
machines.  One feature will involve users piecing together pieces of
information in the order they desire -- essentially dragging it from a
"menu" on the right into the template on the left to create their own
custom document.  We want them to then be able to save this to their
local hard disk and also print it.  It seems that generating a PDF
would be the best way to accomplish both of these things.  We could
probably generate an HTML document, but that wouldn't 1) give us as
much control over the layout and 2) would make images kind of tricky.

We don't want the user to have to install any ActiveX controls or
anything.  The solution must work reliably as-is on all MS Windows
machines.  We can assume they have a standard browser (with Flash
support) and Acrobat Viewer, but don't want to assume anything beyond
that.

Ideas on how to make this work?  Thanks!

So...to confirm, you are looking to have them choose preset components
that, when put together, go on a pdf.

Assuming that your components are enough that you don't want static
pdfs called on the back end, you need a pdf component merging product.
In my experience (and I have done stuff similar many times) your best
bet would be to get a pdf merging engine of some sort from
www.appligent.com. Once you have that, its front end scripting to get
a result code that the merging engine can understand.

I have seen it done in perl mostly, but the dragging could probably be
accomplished easiest in swish (www.swishzone.com) if you know what you
are doing.

The RTF document generation approach I suggested to another question
might work for you:

http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview?id=490712

My company has experience of creating fully dynamic PDF documents for
business to client documents.

Would a fully hosted server side application suffice for your
requirements which your clients could access over the internet
securely - let me know either way and I will post details of how to
contact us where you can give full details of your requirements.

If you're up for a little programming, you could also use the iText
library, which is an open-source Java library for working with PDFs,
including merging multiple PDF documents into a new PDF document. See
http://www.lowagie.com/iText/