[GRLUG] Watermarking "Print" Queue

[Adam Tauno Williams]

On Fri, 2010-05-14 at 10:50 -0400, Roger Roelofs wrote:
> Adam,
> 
> On 5/14/10 10:29 AM, 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.
> First I'd suggest converting to postscript as an intermediate format.
> Postscript is easier to parse and manipulate than pdf.  You can convert
> to pdf as the last step.
> How would the users indicate they want the DRAFT watermark? 

It is a specific print queue [queues are defined in the COBOL
application (AcuCOBOL) separately from the underlying system].

I've just discovered that ImageMagick's composite command works
extremely well for water marking:

composite -dissolve 80% -compose bumpmap \
  -gravity center ./Documents/Organizatis/MI/Draft.eps invoice.pdf 3.pdf

creating a 3.pdf from invoice.pdf with the watermark from Draft.pdf.

Now there is just the joy of finding an ImageMagick build that works on
AIX 5.3.0.  Oh, joy.