Next post Previous post

Acceptance

May 7, 2020 at 10:06 PM by Dr. Drang

There’s a certain type of work I do for which I write a short proposal in single-page letter format and send it to the prospective client as a PDF attached to an email. When I started doing this type of work a few years ago, my thinking was that the client would simply email me back saying they accept the proposal and that I could start the work. But many clients wanted something more formal, or at least more analog.

They wanted something they could sign and send back to me. So I made a small PDF image I could use as a sort of stamp.

Acceptance stamp

After writing the proposal in LaTeX and generating a PDF, I’d open it in PDFpen and add the stamp. At first I’d just open the stamp file, copy it out of that document, and paste it into the proposal. Then I got more clever and added the stamp to my PDFpen Library, so there was no need to open a second file.

The problem with adding the stamp this way was twofold: I had to remember to do it, and then I had to do some manual work in PDFpen. Given that the stamp would always be in the same spot—lower right corner, with a ¾″ margin from the page edges—it seemed like I could get rid of the manual part.

I probably could have written an AppleScript to control PDFpen, but when I finally go around to automating it, I used PDFtk and the stamp option I wrote about last year. What I built was a short shell script that was basically the same as the overlay script I described in that post, but with one of the PDF files being set to the acceptance stamp file, which I had to “grow out” to be a full page.

Acceptance overlay page

This PDFtk automation didn’t last long. It solved the manual placement problem, but I still had to remember to run the script, and it turned out that that was the more important problem to solve. I began searching for a simple way to add the stamp directly in LaTeX.

There are undoubtedly ways to add the stamp using TikZ or some similar drawing package, but I didn’t want to learn a graphics macro language just to remake a drawing I already had. What I ended up using is the pdfoverlay package, which let me put my acceptance stamp in the background and layer the proposal letter over it.

1

Pdfoverlay is included in recent TeX Live and MacTeX distributions. I don’t remember how old my installation was, but I had to update it to get pdfoverlay installed and working. Once I did, though, these two lines were all I needed to add to the preamble to my proposal letters:

\usepackage{pdfoverlay}
\pdfoverlaySetPDF{/path/to/acceptance.pdf}

I edited the TextExpander snippet I use for my proposal template to include these two lines, and now I don’t have to remember anything. Which is one of the main goals of automation, right?

  1. So it’s more like the inverse of a stamp. ↩

Next post Previous post