I can't afford an assistant. At the moment, I'm having trouble affording lunch. :)
Seriously. Don't use JSF to produce PDF's. It's like using a hammer to drive screws. Use a common
servlet to produce the PDF. Your JSF code can talk to it by passing stuff in session-scope objects.
The secret of how to be miserable is to constantly expect things are going to happen the way that they are "supposed" to happen.
You can have faith, which carries the understanding that you may be disappointed. Then there's being a willfully-blind idiot, which virtually guarantees it.