On Thu, 2 Apr 2009, Mike Miller wrote: > Postscript is way cool but there is an awful lot to know, or so it looks > to me. I have a simple question and there might be some tool that will > do what I need. It's a fairly simple problem: > > One program produces 1.5 pages worth of text. > > A second program produces a figure and some text that fills the lower > half of a single page. > > The output of both programs can be in postscript format. > > I want one postscript file that produces two pages in the end -- the > second page should include stuff from both programs: text on top (from > second page of output from first program) and figure/text on the bottom > (from second program). > > Given the way postscript lays things out on a page using coordinates, > this seems like it should be a trivial problem but I don't happen to > know the trick. Any ideas? This turned out to have a very tidy answer that was very hard to find. It isn't exactly what I wanted but it is close enough -- it uses PDF instead of postscript, which is different than desired, but I was going to convert to PDF in the end so this works just as well for me. Someone suggested ImageMagick's composite command. I was aware of that method, but it is really for images and it has some drawbacks. Someone described the problem here: http://studio.imagemagick.org/pipermail/magick-users/2003-June/009769.html I run this command... $ composite -compose multiply text.ps graph.ps output.ps ...and the result is very messy looking and very large: $ ls -l feedback_xdn2.ps barplot_test.ps output.ps -rw-r--r-- 1 mbmiller staff 8955 2009-04-06 23:24 graph.ps -rw-r--r-- 1 mbmiller staff 41047 2009-04-06 11:05 text.ps -rw-r--r-- 1 mbmiller staff 2954388 2009-04-08 09:57 output.ps The output is about 60 times as big as it has to be and if I were to go for higher quality it would grow much larger and it would be much slower. I can "cat" the two postscript files together and it seems to get close to what I want, but a few lines somewhere have to be edited and I don't know which ones! Anyway, I got lucky and found a working solution that uses PDF. Here it is: convert to pdf: ps2pdf graph.ps graph.pdf ps2pdf text.ps text.pdf "stamp" one file onto the other using pdftk: pdftk graph.pdf stamp text.pdf output text_on_graph.pdf pdftk text.pdf stamp graph.pdf output graph_on_text.pdf The pdftk method is fast, the file looks perfect, it makes small files (1/500 the size of postscript from the imagemagick composite method): $ ls -l graph_on_text.pdf text_on_graph.pdf -rw-r--r-- 1 mbmiller staff 6367 2009-04-08 12:11 graph_on_text.pdf -rw-r--r-- 1 mbmiller staff 6187 2009-04-08 12:12 text_on_graph.pdf It turns out in my case that the order of the two files in the pdtk command doesn't matter. Mike