re (3): I have used the headless webkit engine to render high quality PDFs from HTML in the past. It's free. See: https://code.google.com/p/wkhtmltopdf/
Thanks for your reference. I'll try it, but after reading its documentation I'm afraid it doesn't have support for the much needed and non-standard CSS properties invented by PrinceXML (http://princexml.com/doc/8.0/properties/)