Self Made Reports Alternative

There are many Reporting Tool for Java, here can you find an almost complete overview.

Anyway, if you're looking for a low-level, very flexible and self-made solution, can you consider to do your reports in XHTML (with or without a WYSWYG editor), populate it with data with template engine like Velocity.

Then you can trasform your XTML output in PDF with Flying Saucer. The Flying Saucer ist a XTML+CSS renderer to view or convert such document to pdf. It provide also very useful pagination capabilities, like page format, page number, page breaks, header and footer.

Last but not least, can you view or silent print your pdf report with another higt-quality open-souce tool like PDF-Renderer.