overlay one pdf or ps file on top of another

Question

I have two pdf or postscript files (I can work with either one). What I want to do is merge each page on top of the other so that page1 of document A will be combined with page 1 of document B to produce page 1 of the output document. This isn't something I necessarily want need to do programatically, although that would be helpful.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

You can do this with pdf files using the command line tool pdftk using the stamp or background option.

e.g.

$ pdftk file1.pdf background file2.pdf output combinedfile.pdf 

This will only work with a one-page background file. If you have multiple pages, you can use the multibackground command instead.

Answer 2

I had success solving this problem (PDF only and Python) by using pyPdf, specifically the mergePage operation.

From the docs:

# add page 4 from input1, but first add a watermark from another pdf: page4 = input1.getPage(3) watermark = PdfFileReader(file("watermark.pdf", "rb")) page4.mergePage(watermark.getPage(0)) 

Should be enough to get the idea.