I've made use of a CLR to do this, very fast, did pay about $US 300 for the DLL's but that paid for itself many times over. If you're keen on this I can dig around and get you more details. We use it to generate personalised legal contracts, at reasonable volumes. and never had a miss fire from the CLR so far, this process has been going about 5 months now, so seems quite reliable.

we're really just populating a contract that was composed in word and then really just converting/printing that to PDF.

Tell me if you are interested.