Utility to Stamp/Watermark Unicode Text Into a PDF

Question

I am looking for a (preferably) command line utility to stamp/watermark unicode text content into a PDF document.

I tried PDF Stamp and a couple of others that I found over the net, but to no avail with Greek characters (e.g. ΓΔΘΛ become ÃÄÈË).

Many thanks for any help!

Answer 1

With sufficiently "odd" characters, you generally need to specify a font and an encoding. I suspect that at least one of the tools you experimented with have the capability to define such things.

Reading their docs, it looks like PDFStamp will let you specify a font, but not an encoding. That doesn't bode well. It might always pick "Identity-H" for system fonts... worth trying.

I must admit, I'm surprised. "Disappointed" even. Have you contacted their email support?

Once upon a time, iText shipped with a number of command line tools that were mostly intended as examples but were none the less useful. I suspect you could dig them out of the SVN archive on sourceforge and get them to build again, if your Java-fu is up to the task. Just be sure to use BaseFont.IDENTITY_H whenever you're given a choice of encodings for a font.