This is only a very special case of “how to add text given on the command line to a PDF file?“
If I don’t find a nice and read utility to do this,
- I will create an image file from the PDF file,
- I will create another image file from that text string (ImageMagick, GraphicsMagic?!?),
- and I will finally overlay them (ImageMagick, GraphicsMagic?!?).
PDF Hacks‘ Hack# 90 describes how to “Superimpose PDF Pages“; there is also a one-liner with pdftk for that:
$ pdftk mydoc.pdf output mydoc.marked.pdf background watermark.pdf
I need to print like 200 rather similar (1-page) files, which look rather, rather similar, and I don’t want to guess the filename from the contents of the page, so I prefer to print the filename on the same page as the actual contents.
Update 2011-07-04:
I am using text2pdf (a rather, rather simple tool) for this task (regard this as one logical line):
$ echo “text to be printed into the upper left corner” | /usr/local/text2pdf/text2pdf -A4 -s10 -v12 | pdftk original_file output file_with_sth_in_its_upper_left_corner background –