Overlays, underlays, watermarks, n-up

You can use pikepdf to overlay pages or other content on top of other pages.

This might be used to do watermarks (typically an underlay, drawn before everything else), n-up (compositing multiple individual pages on a large page, such as converting slides from a presentation to 4-up for reading and printing).

If you are looking to merge pages from different PDFs, see Merge (concatenate) PDF from several PDFs.

In this example we use pikepdf.Page.add_overlay() to draw a thumbnail of of the second page onto the first page.

In [1]: from pikepdf import Pdf, Page, Rectangle

In [2]: pdf = Pdf.open(...)

In [3]: destination_page = Page(pdf.pages[0])

In [4]: thumbnail = Page(pdf.pages[1])

In [5]: destination_page.add_overlay(thumbnail, Rectangle(0, 0, 300, 300))

In [6]: pdf.save("page1_with_page2_thumbnail.pdf")

The pikepdf.Rectangle specifies the position on the target page into which the other page can be drawn. The object will be drawn centered in a way that fills as much space as possible while preserving aspect ratio.

Use pikepdf.Page.add_underlay() instead if you want content drawn underneath. It is possible content drawn this way will be overdrawn by other objects.

Use pikepdf.Page.trimbox to get a page’s dimensions.

add_overlay will copy content across Pdf objects as needed, and can copy other pages or other Form XObjects.

add_overlay also preserves aspect ratio. Use pikepdf.Page.as_form_xobject() and pikepdf.Page.calc_form_xobject_placement() if you want more precise control over placement.

Composition works using Form XObjects, which is how PDF captures of a group of related objects for drawing. Some very basic PDF software may not support them, or may fail to detect images contained within.

When perform n-up composition, it will work better to create your composition within the existing document, rather than in a new document. Transforming the existing document will ensure that metadata, annotations and hyperlinks are preserved. For example, to convert 16 slides to 4×4-up pages for printing, add four pages onto the end of the file, draw the slides onto the target pages, and then delete the slides.

By default, add_overlay encapsulates the existing content stream in a way that ensures the transformation matrix is first reset, since this behavior aligns with user expectations. This adds a q/Q pair to (push/pop graphics stack) to existing content streams. To disable this (usually desired) behavior use push_stack=False.