Add watermark to various documents investigation

Question

I've been asked to investigate the feasibility of adding watermarks to documents when printed through our application. The documents will consist of word, pdf and cad.

The interface of the application is vb6 with a plethora of vc6 dll's.

I can see a couple of possible solutions:

• Convert all documents to PDF, add a watermark and then print.
• Find a print driver that will add a watermark to all documents prior to printing and install it and reenable it at runtime if it gets disabled for any reason.

3rd Party suites are possibility (we use Volo View Express for viewing CAD files) but since this application is nearing end-of-life we wouldn't want to spend too much on it.

Has anyone had any experience of the above? Any gotcha's that will bog me down?

Answer 1

Tracker Software has a good set of PDF api's that that will allow you to implement the solution you already have in mind. I've used their Image and PDF libraries quite a bit with a lot of success in both VB6 and .NET. Single user licenses are not expensive (depending on how you look at it I guess), and I've found support to be excellent as well.