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Topic: Watermark/merge one PDF with another without loosing hyperlinks
Conf: (P-PDF) Engineering, Msg: 159828
From: dlohmann
Date: 4/29/2007 03:52 PM

Hi Everybody,


I am looking for a clever way to merge some extra information into existing PDF files.

Background: We have a bunch of research papers (PDF) which should be "stamped" on the first page with some small box containing extra information. The information to add includes a link to the publisher data about the paper (http://doi.xxx). Until now this is done by editing each PDF manually in Acrobat, which is a real PITA. So I am developing a scriptable solution.

The general idea is to use a combination of pdflatex/bibtex and Python to extract and typeset the information from a BibTeX database into a single page PDF, which is then stamped on (merged into) the first page of the existing PDF.

The challenge are hyperlinks and the toc. Both PDFs - the original one and the stamp - may contain hyperlinks which I do not want to lose in the merging process. The toc (if present) should be taken from the original paper:

1) My first idea was to use the latex pdfpages package: The stamp document just includes all pages of the original PDF, resulting in a merged version. However, pdfpages does not preserve hyperlinks of the included pages and the toc is lost.

2) Then I tried to use the pdftk tool (http://www.pdfhacks.com/pdftk/), which provides means stamp one PDF document into another:

pdftk paper.pdf stamp stamp.pdf output paper_stamped.pdf

Thereby, hyperlinks and toc of paper.pdf make it into the resulting paper_stamped.pdf - excellent. However, in this case the hyperlink from the stamp is lost.

So it seems that I can preserve hyperlinks from either the stamp or the original PDF, but not both :-(

Are there other tools or packages I can look into?
Is there a completely different approach I might try?
(has to run on Linux and preferably be open source.)


Thanks a lot!

Daniel