Mind of Matt

How can I combine two PDF files so that they are “overlayed” one to the other?

This might become necessary if you want to add content to an already existing PDF file, e.g. when doing pre-press work for flyers etc.. For example, you might resize one PDF file to have additional place on the page, and put other content into that free space.

Get yourself two PDF files to overlay on each other, both of the same page size (else automatic resizing is employed), and both one-sided.

Then use this command to generate the combined PDF file with overlays:

pdftk file1.pdf background file2.pdf output out.pdf

Posted

in

,

by

matt

Tags:

Comments

2 responses to “How can I combine two PDF files so that they are “overlayed” one to the other?”

  1. Jindra

    Not background but multibackground …

  2. matthias

    Jindra, thanks for the comment. You’re right in cases where you want to overlay whole documents on each other, so that background page 1 appears behind document page 1, background page 2 behind document page 2 etc..

    The case above happened to use a single-page PDF document, so a single-page background PDF document and the simple “background” option was enough.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.