Miguel Ros has written another tutorial for creating PDFs with CakePHP. He uses in his tutorial the HTML 2 (F)PDF library. Miguel writes:
You don’t have total control over PDF, and not all HTML tags are supported, but it permits render a .thtml directly to a PDF!! If you want total PDF control by code, you have to use the other PDF tutorial creating_pdfs
Check out fpdf.org. It is by far the most flexible and extensible PDF generator I have found, and it’s free!
It can’t do a direct conversion from HTML to PDF, so you have to use the methods of the class in the view file, but it’s great anyway.