Ask HN: How to generate beautiful PDF reports?

I'm working on a project at my company which will require generating performance review PDFs, containing several graphs, tables, and a bit of free form text. We do data analysis in python, and I was hoping for something where I could output an intermediate representation in XML or something similar, then process it into a nice-looking PDF. Tools like DocBook seem interesting but I'm not sure how amenable they are to this type of publishing.