You should be able to edit your account information and change the email address to your university email address. This will trigger a verification email to the newly entered address. Once verified, the new email address will be updated to the primary.
Yea, i think that it greatly depends on what the PDF is. In some applications I had both mechanisms for generating PDFs. When we needed something with a bit more granular control, we'd use Prawn. I do like Prawn because it is battle tested and it doesn't have a lot of external dependencies. But you're right, the added complexities and DSL can be overwhelming to say the least.