Frankly, I think creating PDFs is the wrong way to provide your needs.
You seem to have two problems:
a) You need to update many character sheets.
b) You need to communicate them easily across various message-boards and wikis.
Creating an editable PDF would not allow you to easily update lots of sheets. You can try using Metacreator, but that costs money and has its problems, especially if you use house rules. A PDF file also cannot be easily posted to many message-boards and wikis.
Creating a text-based standard format for the character sheet would frankly be superior. It would allow quick reference, easy updating, and could be shared more easily and adapted to a character's unique needs as needed. It also offers room for a detailed seasonal history, notes, and so on. It's less pretty, but it's better for your needs IMO.
That still won't make it easy to update lots of characters. I suggest using a uniform spreadsheet to produce the character sheets of grogs and companions. This page for example uses fairly pretty sheets that include weapon stats (though I think it's for 4e), and where the only thing you really need to update are the experience points - the spreadsheet then calculates the scores, determines derivative scores, and so on. I myself prefer to list each season's advancement and let the spreadsheet sum it up - this leaves a "paper trail" that allows me to look back at the character's history and saves me the trouble of adding up the xp on the page - but it is harder to program, and makes the spreadsheet heavier (a past attempt of mine is here, but there are probably much better ways of doing this). Either way, you can print out the character sheet of the spreadsheet as a PDF if desired (using OpenOffice or a free PDF-printer driver), and with enough Excel/Calc-fu can make it a pretty page too. This provides you with the same benefits as a form PDF, but makes it much easier to update lots of characters.
The spreadsheet approach probably won't work as well for magi, since there is lots of information there that needs detailed updating - like the details of magic items, spells, and so on. You could try to create a combined spreadsheet-text two-files package, that updates the basic statistics based on the spreadsheet but allows further notes in the text document. This is more complicated to create, however.
Finally, a note on the sheet itself - I personally find that I like the D&D 3/4 character statblock idea. The basic idea there was to divide the sheet into thematic blocks, and order the information in each according to the order it would be called up in play. The blocks are separated clearly, by a line or so on. In text form, it would look something like this; an Word/Writer document can look much prettier and clearer. The point is - rethink the entire structure of the sheet, and build one that serves your needs most effectively.
I also don't like the idea of having "+3 Intelligence (bright)" on the sheet - I think I prefer to have "Intelligence +3 (bright)" or "Intelligence (bright) +3". That allows for easier scanning of what I'm looking for, and fits my intuition just fine - I'm looking for my score in Intelligence, not my intelligence in "+3". I agree that the score should be as close to the ability name as possible, to make it easy to look up - but it should be after the ability's name, not before it. So as a compromise, I'd go with:
Intelligence +3 (bright) [1 Aging Point]
Awareness 5 (standing guard) [75 XP]
Creo 5+3 [15 XP]
and so on.
