Friday, August 14, 2009

linux: how to insert an img to pdf files

If you want to insert an image (like your picture, signature etc.) to an existing pdf file and you don't have acrobat professional version (that allows you to edit a pdf file within the software). Then you may be able to use the following steps with combination of different tools that are available in linux:

  1. You have an image file (say, one lovely picture) and one pdf file (Orig.pdf) to which you want to insert your picture
  2. Use "gimp" to open them. For the pdf file, you have to select which page that you want to insert your picture to, and then open the page (NOTE: in order to have good quality and same size as the original page, you may have to set "resolution" as 320. I tried 300 and 400, and realized that 320 is the proper value)
  3. In "gimp", copy your picture on the pdf page. You can use the menu "Layer -> Scale Layer ..." to scale your picture to fit your requirement.
  4. Save your modified pdf page as one "eps" file.
  5. In terminal, convert the eps file to a pdf file by "epstopdf MyPage.eps" to get MyPage.pdf
  6. Then, still in your terminal, use the tool "pdftk" to merge the 2 pdf files (Orig.pdf and MyPage.pdf):
pdftk A=Orig.pdf B=MyPage.pdf cat A1-4 B1 A6-11 output Combined.pdf
where we assume MyPage.pdf will be inserted as Page 5 while totoal pages in Orig.pdf are 11 pages.

Merge pdf files:

pdftk 1.pdf 2.pdf 3.pdf cat output 123.pdf

Thursday, August 13, 2009

linux:command:pdf: a useful tool

In linux, there is a very useful PDF tool called pdftk

http://www.accesspdf.com/pdftk/

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