Quickly apply an overlay to every page of a PDF file
Overlay is a simple bash script that overlays one PDF file over
another. It takes the first page of the first PDF file, and overlays
it onto every page of the second PDF file. In the typical use case,
the first PDF would contain a header/footer/stamp/watermark and the
second PDF file contains multiple pages of content. overlay will
combine these two PDF files into a single one so that now every page
contains the header/footer/stamp/watermark.
Overlay uses LaTeX to produce the final PDF file. On Debian-based distributions the following command will install the required packages:
apt install textlive-latex-extra
On MacOSX, use the following command:
brew install mactex
On Windows, use
WSL so
you can use the apt command above :-)
./overlay <first-PDF-file> <second-PDF-file> [<output-PDF-file>]
I created overlay because I could not find any other way of merging
two PDF files by overlaying them. However, the use of LaTeX for this
relatively simple operation is somewhat overkill.
Do you know of another solution to overlay two PDF files? Or do you
perhaps have some pointers to help me implement overlay without the
LaTeX dependency? If so, I would love to hear from you!