if you do a search for "create pdf vba) you get quite a few useful articles. The first one to jump out at me is this
http://p2p.wrox.com/archive/vba_excel/2002-11/37.asp

Clearly this has a programmatic interface.

Also just discovered our PDF creator has a command line version which means that I could save and close my workbook, do an application.run command_line to create the pdf and then pick it up and email it.

regards

got to go I have a document to finish