Using CSS for Hard-Copy
For those interested in using CSS for more than just web page formatting--it IS afterall a generic stylesheet language, check out the most recent article at A List Apart for publishing CSS-based books with the "Boom" micro-format.
For more serious jobs, check out Prince. It's about 3,000 USD for a full license, but the trial version is free and it lets you go quite seemlessly to professionally publishable PDF. In short, Prince is XML + CSS = PDF and can even be deployed for report generation for server-side processing. I think a good next step here is to define a nice XML-RPC set for Prince so that I can call it as Web Service w/o all of the complexity of a full-blown SOAP interface. I'm not knocking SOAP, but XML-RPC is a better 'first-step' here. Once that's working, one can always 'port-up' to a finer-grained SOAP implementation.