I ended up using Ghostscript to accomplish this task. There is a command line tool that relies on Ghostscript called gsprint. You don’t even need Acrobat installed to print PDFs in this fashion which is quite nice. Here is an example: on the command line: gsprint -printer \\server\printer “test.pdf” from python: win32api.ShellExecute(0, ‘open’, ‘gsprint.exe’, ‘-printer … Read more
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 … Read more
Bit too big for a comment, so I’ve added a new answer. The EndPage procedure (see page 441 of the PostScript Language Reference Manual) takes two additional parameters on the stack, a count of pages emitted so far, and a reason code. You can use the count of pages to do interesting things like duplexing, … Read more
When I did it (which about 12 years ago) I started with the postscript driver sample, replaced all the postscript-specific stuff (in my case, to write to a bitmap instead of generating postscript commands). I also wrote a custom print monitor (the driver writes to the spooler, which write to a monitor): my monitor wrote … Read more
You can do this with pdf files using the command line tool pdftk using the stamp or background option. e.g. $ pdftk file1.pdf background file2.pdf output combinedfile.pdf This will only work with a one-page background file. If you have multiple pages, you can use the multibackground command instead.
Meanwhile the latest Ghostscript releases have a much nicer and easier to use method of removing all images from a PDF. The parameter to add to the command line is -dFILTERIMAGE gs -o noimages.pdf -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dFILTERIMAGE input.pdf Even better, you can also remove all text or all vector drawing elements from a PDF by specifying … Read more