Overlay Two Postscript Files (Command Line Approach)

How to merge two postscript files together?

Here is an example Ghostscript commandline, which would convert and merge the two (or more) PostScript files into one PDF in a one go:

 gswin32c.exe ^
   -o c:/path/to/output.pdf ^
   -sDEVICE=pdfwrite ^
   -dPDFSettings=/Screen ^
   [...more desired parameters (optional)...] ^
   /path/to/first.ps ^
   /path/to/second.ps ^
   /path/to/third.pdf

Edit: my first shot had falsely assumed PDF input files. It works of course with PostScript as well (or even a mix of PS/PDF)... And the output may also be PS.

Concatenate and 4-up Postscript files

I think a2ps is having difficulty because it doesn't process the postscript natively, but instead uses a delegate program. So it treats postscript files essentially as images, and inserts the file (with some small wrapping) more or less directly into its output. a2ps really shines at pretty-printing source code, but concatenation and N-up compositing of already "rendered" ps documents is a little outside of its proper scope, IMO. It's the wrong tool for this job.

The tool for making 4up versions of postscript files is psnup, part of psutils, for which I found a nice link here.

Duh. I guess the given error output clearly shows what I "guessed" above. The link goes into details, but I'll summarize here. You need to take control of how the 1-page documents are rotated and concatenated (using ps2ps) before they are fed to psnup.

Embed once and reference many times an EPS file in postscript

You could define the EPS as a form, then execute the form as required. See the PostScript Language Reference Manual, section 4.7:

4.7 Forms A form is a self-contained description of any arbitrary graphics, text, or sampled images that are to be painted multiple
times, either on several pages or at several locations on the same
page. The appearance of a form is described by a PostScript procedure
that invokes graphics operators. Language support for forms is a
LanguageLevel 2 feature.

Note that the Ghostscript pswrite/ps2write devices don't support handling PDF forms as PostScript forms, so embed the olutput multiple times. My assumption is that this is why your approach [2] doesn't work.

How can I make a program overlay text on a postscript file?

Ok, the example file you linked to is well behaving (and has not re-defined the showpage operator).

So I'm now assuming the following:

1. All your .ps files are similar to your example file.
2. All your .ps files are 1 page only (like .eps files).
3. All your filenames are like constructed as gnp-NNN.ps (like gnp-544.ps is).
4. The number you want to appear in the top right corner is NNN from the filename.

I also assume you have Ghostscript installed, and it is the most recent version, 8.71. I'm currently on Windows -- if you're on Linux/Unix, just replace gswin32c.exe by gs and all line endings ^ by \.

Test PDF Output

Now try this command first:

gswin32c.exe ^
 -o gnp-with-number-544.pdf ^
 -sDEVICE=pdfwrite ^
 -g5030x5320 ^
 -c "/Helvetica-Italic findfont 15 scalefont setfont 453 482 moveto (544) show" ^
 -f gnp-544.ps

and see if the resulting gnp-with-number-544.pdf looks like you want it.

The -c "..." is used to pass PostScript snippets to Ghostscript and make it process these together with the main .ps file which has then to follow as next parameter, with -f ....

You can modify parameters:

• Replace the /Helvetica-Italic fontname by /Helvetica, /Courier, /Times, Helvetica-Bold or whatever you've available and prefer.
• Or modify the fontsize: 15 here means 15 points (in PDF 72 points == 1 inch).
• Or change the position: 453 482 moves the PostScript currentpoint to "453 points to the left, 482 points to the top" (with the oringin 0,0 set to the bottom left corner).
• Or tweak the media size: -g5030x5320 gives you 503x532 points (due to the default resolution of 720 dpi used by -sDEVICE=pdfwrite.
• Or set the string being printed to (File No. 544) show or whatever you want.

You could also add quite a few parameters to tweak the quality of the output file (resolution, font embedding etc.), but these ones will do for now.

Change to PostScript Output

Should you need PostScript output for some reason instead of PDF, change the command like this:

gswin32c.exe ^
 -o gnp-with-number-544.ps ^
 -sDEVICE=ps2write ^
 -g5030x5320 ^
 -c "/Helvetica-Italic findfont 15 scalefont setfont 453 482 moveto (544) show" ^
 -f gnp-544.ps

Batch-convert Lots of Files

Now, how to batch-convert this? For this last step, I'm assuming:

1. your NNN numbering scheme is not using leading 0s.
2. your range of files to be converted is gnp-1.ps..gnp-1000.ps.
3. you want PDF output with the numbers added, not PS.

On Windows, create an addnumbers-make-pdf.bat file with this content:

gswin32c.exe ^
-o gnp-with-number-%1.pdf ^
-sDEVICE=pdfwrite ^
-g5030x5320 ^
-c "/Helvetica-Italic findfont 15 scalefont setfont 453 482 moveto (%1) show" ^
-f gnp-%1.ps

Now run this command in a cmd.exe console:

for /l %i in (1,1,100) do (addnumbers-make-pdfvim.bat %i)

On Linux, create an addnumbers-make-pdf.sh Bash shell script with this content:

#!/bin/bash
gs \
-o gnp-with-number-${1}.pdf \
-sDEVICE=pdfwrite \
-g5030x5320 \
-c "/Helvetica-Italic findfont 15 scalefont setfont 453 482 moveto (${1}) show" \
-f gnp-${1}.ps

Now run this command in a shell:

for i in $(seq 1 1000); do addnumbers-make-pdf.sh ${i} ; done

Update:

Hah!, it even works ;-) I just tested it on Windows. Here is a screenshot with the original and the overlayed file (as PDFs):

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