That will be a pain
Yes, it will be. You are in for a LOT of tedious fiddling. My advice: start simple and stay away from the
servlet environment until you have everything working with mock data.
I used the Apache FOP project -
found here - so I can't comment on iText.
I found "Definitive XSL-FO" book by Holman to be a great reference - that was a while ago, perhaps there is an updated version. There are a lot of tricky details.
Bill