Back for some more pdf exporting fun... I'm using nlapiXMLToPDF to push my xml string and pop out the PDF, my only issue is, none of the freemarker vars are working, which it seems they should be doing. any ideas folk?

nlapiXMLtoPDF just passes your xml to the BFO Engine. This is a third party library that converts your XML to PDF. I believe that your xml should contain the data of the before you make the API call since the BFO engine cannot replace the FreeMarker variables.