JSF to XHTML to SVG or PDF

I haven't looked at JSF since 2004 where I thought it would be cool to combine Swing and JSF. Coming back to JSF after nearly two years I came across, Combine JSF Facelets and the Flying Saucer XHTML Renderer which takes XHTML content and rendered it using Swing this is then transformed into an image, PDF or SVG. In the past I've used iReport and directly iText to generate reports (PDF and Excel). The thing at the back of my mind is always, this seems to be reproducing a lot of what HTML does and people only really want PDF because it prints well and Excel because they have macros. Until there are macros built into browsers to do manipulation of data that is.