With a PDF it is different. Setup the automation to trigger on your Reports Table as usual - on a row added or changed.
Inside the PDF template you would use START/END blocks with SELECT statements that choose the rows from whatever table or tables you wish to report on. You might use the Reports table row to grab criteria to use in the associated SELECTs but otherwise you basically ignore the Reports table row for the report data itself.
I hope this helps!
If you are not familiar with START/END blocks refer to this article : Use Start expression in templates