Home/ Questions/Q 7164675
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-05-28T14:06:52+00:00

I’m writing an application that faxes a document (many supported types) provided by the

  • 0

I’m writing an application that faxes a document (many supported types) provided by the end user. A requirement is that the end user can also provide text to be used as part of a custom fax header.

I’ve been using Ghostscript to render PDFs as TIFFs and it’s been working great so far, but I have yet to find a straightforward way of overlaying the custom header at the top of a PDF. I’ve tried out a few recommendations:

… with no luck.

I’ve used ImageMagick to do this successfully with documents rendered to TIFF via other tools, and I’m aware that ImageMagick can render PDF-to-TIFF on its own. However, I want to stick with Ghostscript because in my experience it has performed better and rendered clearer TIFFs.

Is this possible using Ghostscript and perhaps a PS helper script?

Edit:

Ghostscript (v9.04) is not throwing any errors. For example:

gswin64c -dSAFER -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -dPDFFitPage -sDEVICE=tiffg3 ^
    -sOutputFile=goofy.tif ^
    -c "/Courier findfont 12 scalefont setfont 50 765 moveto (header text) show" ^
    -f goofy.pdf

… produces a TIFF of the original PDF, but without the text I tried to add. If I append showpage to the postscript one-liner it (predictably, I suppose) prints a new, blank-except-for-header page, which doesn’t help me much.

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I would use another commandline tool combined with Ghostscript for this task. This tool is pdftk.exe. Then use a 3 step approach:

    1. The task of Ghostscript would be to create an (otherwise empty) page with the header text: 
      gswin64c.exe ^
  -o header.pdf ^
  -sDEVICE=pdfwrite ^
  -c "/Courier findfont 12 scalefont setfont" ^
  -c "50 765 moveto (header text) show showpage"
    2. The task of pdftk would be to overlay (stamp or background) the PDF file with the text header over the original PDF: 
       pdftk.exe goofy.pdf background header.pdf output goofy-with-header.pdf

      or

       pdftk.exe goofy.pdf stamp header.pdf output goofy-with-header.pdf
    3. The last step is to employ Ghostscript again in order to create your final TIFF output: 
      gswin64c.exe ^
   -dPDFFitPage ^
   -o goofy-with-header.tif ^
   -sDEVICE=tiffg3 ^
    goofy-with-header.pdf
    • 0