How to do mail merge on top of a PDF?
I often get a PDF from our designer (built in Adobe InDesign) which is supposed to be sent out to thousands of people.
I've got the list with all the people, and it's easy doing a mail merge in OpenOffice.org. However, OpenOffice.org doesn't support the advanced PDF. I just want to output some text onto each page and print it out.
Here's how I do it now: print out 6.000 copies of the PDF, then put all of them into the printer again and just print out name, address and other information on top of it. But that's expensive.
Sadly, I can't make the PDF to an image and use that in OpenOffice.org because it grinds the computer to a halt. It also takes extremely long time to send this job to the printer.
So, is there an easy way to do this mail merge (preferably in Python) without paying for third party closed solutions?
Answer
Now I've made an account. I fixed it by using the ingenious pdftk.
In my quest I totally overlook the feature "background" and "overlay". My solution was this:
pdftk names.pdf background boat_background.pdf output out.pdf
Creating the names.pdf you can easily do with Python reportlab or similar PDF-creation scripts. It's best using code to do that, creating 6k pages took several hours in LibreOffice/OpenOffice, while it took just a few seconds using Python.