[GRLUG] Watermarking "Print" Queue

[John-Thomas Richards]

On Fri, May 14, 2010 at 10:29:46AM -0400, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
> I've had this stupid task on my to-do list since Febuary of '08;  and 
> while I take swings at it occasionally I never arrive at something that 
> works.
> 
> We have a COBOL application that spools out jobs in PCL [a crude PCL at 
> that] on an AIX host.  I have a simple "queue" on that host which instead 
> turns the print job into a PDF and mails it to the user (which is very 
> popular).
> 
> However, users want to do the same thing but have the PDF watermarked with 
> "DRAFT".  I've tried various cocktails with enscript, pdftk, etc... but 
> never found a working solution.
> 
> Anyone have any ideas?

This may be way off base but in the TeX/LaTeX world, one must first
print to PostScript and then convert the postscript file to a PDF in
order for a watermark to appear.  The default LaTeX output is a DVI
file.  Converting that to PDF won't show the watermark.  It must be
DVI-->PS-->PDF.
-- 
john-thomas
------
Strike an average between what a woman thinks of her husband a month before
she marries him and what she thinks of him a year afterward, and you will
have the truth about him.
H.L. Mencken, writer, editor, and critic (1880-1956)