I\'m working on an existing Java web application (HTML/CSS/JS/JSP/Servlets and Java classes in this particular app) that currently uses an applet to print checks.
My
I ended up digging deeper into using iText and came across flying-saucer which makes it super-easy to render a PDF from XML or XHTML.
Check it out at http://code.google.com/p/flying-saucer/
I also found out how to partially hide the save functionality by rendering the PDF inside a hidden iframe: Create a "print-only" PDF with itext