Imposing a pdf/postscript on top of another one

[Antonio Olivares]

On Sunday, August 20, 2017, Polytropon <freebsd at edvax.de
<javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','freebsd at edvax.de');>> wrote:

> On Sun, 20 Aug 2017 11:41:59 -0500, Antonio Olivares wrote:
> > Dear FreeBSD users,
> >
> > Using only commands like psmerge, psnup, from psutils and a customized
> > script with awk or sed is it possible to force a picture created using
> > gnuplot as the background and impose a ps/pdf document created by
> tex/latex
> > on top of it.  No other packages/programs like background package in
> latex,
> > or pdftk, are available.  It is an old machine that is offline running
> > 8.3-RELEASE amd64.
> > The command psmerge does not work correctly.  The files can be combined
> > using ghostscript, but my goal is to use a graph from gnuplot output to
> > postscript not eps, then process a tex file and output it to postscript
> > with dvips.  After this is done have a script that sets the postscript
> file
> > from gnuplot as the background and puts the one created by dvips on top
> of
> > that one.  The postscript from gnuplot is fixed with fixbb and removes
> > unnessary space, the other file postscript file is in letter format.
> > Ideas, suggestions, advice are appreciated.
>
> I think what you're describing is a good task for pdftk.
> You just need to provide the components to overlay in
> PDF format, which is not a problem with pdflatex and
> ps2pdf or convert (from ImageMagick) for the GNUplot
> output.
>
> See "man pdftk" for the "background" keyword.
>
>
>
> --
> Polytropon
> Magdeburg, Germany
> Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
> Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...
>
The stackexchange page has pdftk as its first choice

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/501723/overlay-one-
pdf-or-ps-file-on-top-of-another

However, my machine which has the postscript files is offline (no internet
connection) and no pdftk is available to do this :(

The psmerge utility part of psutils is available but does not work.  It is
referenced here

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3444931/how-to-merge-two-postscript-files-together

Thanks for your input.  I may have to copy the files and take them to
another machine so I can try to use pdftk or maybe use a command from
imagemagick which can do the job?

Best Regards,


Antonio