Re: Type on top of a PDF?

From: James H. Cloos Jr. (cloos@jhcloos.com)
Date: Fri Feb 14 2003 - 14:39:26 EST

  • Next message: Stephen Viles: "Re: phantom characters"

    >>>>> "Brian" == abiword <abiword@interlinx.bc.ca> writes:

    Brian> Many many times, I have gotten a PDF form that I have had to
    Brian> fill in. I always have to resort to printing the form out and
    Brian> filling it in by hand with a pen. This sucks.

    I print these to a postscript file, use gv to determine the
    coordinates where strings should be printed (there is a text field
    under the File menu in gv's gui that shows the cursor's coordinates)
    and then add in x y moveto (string) show lines just before the
    showpage for each line.

    There are limitations to this. It is hard to get things to work if
    you want to embed a font, so I always use a font available w/o
    embedding. (My current printer requires ghostscript, so I can use any
    font in gs's Fontmap. Else it'd have to be a font dl'ed to the
    printer.)

    Here is an example. The proginal ps file produced by acroread had the
    page end with:

    PDFVars/TermAll get exec end end
    userdict /pgsave get restore
    showpage
    %%PageTrailer
    %%EndPage

    I changed that part to:

    PDFVars/TermAll get exec end end
    userdict /pgsave get restore
    /Times-Roman findfont 10 scalefont setfont
    237 701 moveto (x) show
     50 500 moveto (x) show
     66 455 moveto (x) show
     56 128 moveto (James H. Cloos, Jr.) show
    showpage
    %%PageTrailer
    %%EndPage

    to x three checkboxes and put my name on a line.

    That pattern should provide enough info on how to create something to
    automate the task.

    Note that the above is independent of whether acrobat was used to make
    the pdf into a fill-out pdf, and should work with any pdf-to-ps output.

    -JimC

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