Try
www.fpdf.org/
Their project produces PDF document online from pure PHP, without PDFLib libraries. The Scripts section has some scripts that translate html string into pdf. So clone the news_print function of cpg-nuke to capture the generated "printer friendly" html code of the page and pass it to the HTML2PDF function will return you the pdf.
I was thinking this before but just have no time to do so. Please let me know if you have and progress.