Multipage background in PDF, using pdftk or other tool

Question

How to add multipage background (eg. odd and even backgrounds) to 10 thousands pages PDF, with keeping output file as small as possible?

I'm doing massively multipage documents (eg. 10000 pages in one document). Each page has background, which I apply in such way:

1. I have lot of .dvi documents, I join them using dviconcat
2. next I do dvipdf on joined .dvi
3. and next I use pdftk to apply background, using pdftk infile.pdf background bg.pdf output outfile.pdf

In this way, I have fairly small file, eg. 200MB, comparing to situation when I produce lot of .pdf files with background and join them using pdftk and resulting file is eg. 2G.

I think it's because background is not repeated every page, but it's copy is stored in PDF only once and there is some kind of reference in pages.

Unfortunately, now I need to use 2pages / 2 sides background. Different background for odd pages and different for even. PDFtk don't know how to do it. I can prepare 10.000 pages background, but it will be huge (eg. 1G).

Any suggestion how could I accomplish it, without playing with multi-gigabytes files? Is it doable at all? If yes - with pdftk or some different tool?

Answer 1

One solution would be to do the background when you convert PostScript to PDF. Using a BeginPage procedure you can paint the background before you pain the page contents. By checking the page count in BeginPage you can choose which background to paint, so you can have different ones for even/odd/whatever pages.

If you specify each background as a PostScript form, then your BeginPage can be small, also (and rather more importantly) the current version of Ghostscript, 9.14, will attempt to pass PostScript forms into a PDF file as a PDF form,and it can identify and consolidate duplicates so it 'should' only embed each form once. This should result in the minimum possible file size.

However, this code is at an early stage of development and might not work for you, also you'll need to do some PostScript programming.

I'm not familiar with pdftk, but would it be possible to produce all the even page, add a background to them. Produce all the odd pages, add a different background, then use pdftk to merge and interleave the pages ?

NB Ghostscript doesn't handle .dvi files, so I'm rather at a loss to know how you use Ghostscript to 'join' them. Also, if you are somehow creating the PostScript files using Ghostscript, you would almost certainly be better off using Ghostscript to produce the PDF file directly. (I'm assuming here that you are using Ghostscript's ps2pdf, but even if you aren't it'll still be quicker to produce the PDF in one step, and almost certainly produce better output too)