[texhax] Draft Overlay

[Browder, Tom]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: texhax-bounces at tug.org [mailto:texhax-bounces at tug.org] 
> On Behalf Of Browder, Tom
> I want to overprint a big DRAFT in light grayscale, rotated 
> 45 degrees so it lies on the long diagonal, on every page of 
> my document during the draft process.
(snip)

First, I failed to specify I needed a solution for pdfelatex, so Joel's
and Sukomal Modak's excellent solutions won't work.

Then I failed to take advantage of the Tug FAQ (the suggestion by Lars
Madsen that led to success).  There I looked at several solutions for a
"watermark" (that term is what I should have used to describe the
problem).

(Note: I am surprised that the "LaTeX Companion" has no index entry at
all for "watermark" since I believe it is a widely-used term in the
printing trade.)

Anyway, the non-teTeX package, "wallpaper,", by Michael H.F. Wilkinson
(available from CTAN), did the trick, with a little help from ps2pdf (on
a Linux Fedora Core 2 system):

I first made a ps doc with the watermark as I wanted it:

<<<< draft.ps
%!PS-Adobe-3.0
gsave
4.25 72 mul 11 .5 mul 72 mul translate
50 rotate
.7 setgray
/Times-Bold findfont 120 scalefont setfont
-2.5 72 mul -40 moveto (DRAFT) show
grestore
Showpage
>>>> draft.ps

Then I converted it to PDF:

  ps2pdf draft.ps draft.pdf

I added the following lines in my document preamble:

<<<< doc.tex
\usepackage{wallpaper}
\CenterWallPaper{1}{draft.pdf}
>>>> doc.tex

I made the doc:

  pdfelatex doc 

Then viewed it:

  xpdf doc.pdf

And it works!  A light gray "DRAFT" on every page.

The DRAFT is not perfectly centered, but that's easy tweaking.

Thanks for all the suggestions, wish I had specified pdf in the original
call for help.

Tom Browder