Imposing a pdf/postscript on top of another one

[Polytropon]

On Sun, 20 Aug 2017 11:41:59 -0500, Antonio Olivares wrote:
> Dear FreeBSD users,
> 
> Using only commands like psmerge, psnup, from psutils and a customized
> script with awk or sed is it possible to force a picture created using
> gnuplot as the background and impose a ps/pdf document created by tex/latex
> on top of it.  No other packages/programs like background package in latex,
> or pdftk, are available.  It is an old machine that is offline running
> 8.3-RELEASE amd64.
> The command psmerge does not work correctly.  The files can be combined
> using ghostscript, but my goal is to use a graph from gnuplot output to
> postscript not eps, then process a tex file and output it to postscript
> with dvips.  After this is done have a script that sets the postscript file
> from gnuplot as the background and puts the one created by dvips on top of
> that one.  The postscript from gnuplot is fixed with fixbb and removes
> unnessary space, the other file postscript file is in letter format.
> Ideas, suggestions, advice are appreciated.

I think what you're describing is a good task for pdftk.
You just need to provide the components to overlay in
PDF format, which is not a problem with pdflatex and
ps2pdf or convert (from ImageMagick) for the GNUplot
output.

See "man pdftk" for the "background" keyword.



-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...