How to stamp only the last page of a PDF

Question

I have the following code to stamp a pdf with a an image that is converted to a pdf. Everything seems to work except for it stamps every page in the pdf. How can i get it to only stamp the last page of the pdf?

pdftk temp-pdfjam.pdf stamp signature-pdfjam.pdf output final/finalized.pdf

Harrier

Answer 1

If you want to work only with pdftk, it looks like you will have to extract the last page using the cat command of pdftk, stamp it, then join it with the first pages - or prepare a PDF with the appropriate number of blank pages and use the "multistamp" command.

Jannet

Is there another way that you know of to be able to do this that's easier? – Harrier

Not off the top of my head. You could certainly implement something yourself, but I doubt that would be easier. Maybe there are other tools that can do it, but I don't know any. – Jannet

Answer 2

A working snippet using pdftk

#!/bin/sh

input=$1
watermark=$2
output=$3
abl=/tmp/all_but_last.pdf
last=/tmp/last.pdf
last_stamped=/tmp/last_stamped.pdf

# detach
pdftk $1 cat 1-r2 output $abl 
pdftk $1 cat end output $last 
#Stamp
pdftk $last stamp $watermark output $last_stamped
#Attach
pdftk $abl $last_stamped cat output $output

Run it as a shell script :

./stamp_last_page.sh input.pdf stamp.pdf output.pdf

Edaphic

Alas, the size of the file suffers from the treatment by pdftk – Deen

Answer 3

Try cpdf:

cpdf -stamp-on stamp.pdf in.pdf 1 -o out.pdf

You can replace '1' with any page range you want.

Alpestrine

note that cpdf has "a special not-for-commercial-use license" (github.com/coherentgraphics/cpdf-binaries/blob/master/LICENSE) -- for applications like this that are handled well by open source tools I don't see a point in investing in cpdf - not sure if it has an edge in some special use case though – Wesson

in a quick test, cdpf did not bloat file size like pdftk did – Lakeishalakeland