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 LyX/LaTeX/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 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?
Thanks a lot!
Daniel
