PDF overlaying?

oscarBravo

I'm looking for an app that will let me "overlay" a PDF file onto another. A commercial program that can do this is FyTek's PDF Meld - is anyone aware of a Free equivalent? Preferably Linux, but I could live with a Windows app.

As an example of what I'm looking for, I have some letters that I've printed on my company's letterhead. I'd like to email the letters to the recipient in advance of posting the paper version, and it would be great to merge them with a PDF version of the letterhead before I do.

Thanks!

Capt'n Midnight

Could you scan in the letterhead and use it as a background in the original document , before you generate the PDF's ?

oscarBravo

Yeah, that'll work in an app like OpenOffice.org. My problems start when I'm using an application like LyX to generate the document.

Thanks for the suggestion.

Capt'n Midnight

Windows way
put the background image into the default document template for OO, then associate a new file Extension OO. Set your default printer to PdfCreator.

if you save the file as the extension , you should be able to right click and print via OO to a pdf.

PhantomBeaker

Stupid idea... but ImageMagick does *->pdf conversions and pdf->* conversions. Basically it has plugins to handle pdf stuff, and also handles overlays and the like in its stride.

So if you generate your own pdf with LyX and overlay over the letter head with image magick, that might work. Let me know if works, because that may be handy for me in the future.

Take care,
The Phantom Beaker

deRanged

I might not be understanding you correctly - why aren't you importing the letterhead in the tex?

Is the letterhead fullpage? Even then you could crop the whitespace and
just write the letter in tex with the letterhead.

oscarBravo

deRanged wrote:

I might not be understanding you correctly - why aren't you importing the letterhead in the tex?

It's really not that important. It's a full-bleed letterhead with top- and bottom-sections, and getting it to look right in Tex (and specifically in LyX) is more trouble than it's worth. I'll be posting the printed version anyway - the PDF is just an advance preview. It would have been nice to be able to merge the two documents, since I already have the letterhead in PDF format.

oscarBravo

I'm dragging this thread back up to share a wonderful app with y'all: pdftk.

If PDF is electronic paper, then pdftk is an electronic staple-remover, hole-punch, binder, secret-decoder-ring, and X-Ray-glasses.

It does the overlay thing I was looking for before, and also does a neat trick I needed today: I have a LyX document, an Excel spreadsheet and a Word document. I needed to produce a single PDF consisting of the LyX document followed by the first page of the Word document, the Excel spreadsheet and then the rest of the Word document. With pdftk, one single command did it quickly and easily. It's the dogs!