[ale] is there an open source program permitting creating/editing of PDF files ?

[Ed Cashin]

If you're not tied to WYSIWYG, you can use pdftex or pdflatex
or ConTeXt.  The latter used to be a little tricky to set up in
teTeX, but I used TeX live, its successor, in debian, and I
found ConTeXt to be much easier to use "out of the box" now.

In 2000, pdftex was a really neat way to create PDFs on the
fly based on information in a database as part of a web application.

  http://noserose.net/e/papers/workflow.pdf

It was so fast, accurate, and free that I bet it still is.

-- 
  Ed Cashin <ecashin at noserose.net>