ok. i've done lot's of reading and still not able to find an answer or solution, so here goes.. i have custom programs written in Basis pro5. Standard output to a pdf virtual printer works fine. Using pdftk to overlay on to a form is hit or miss.... There are products out there like Unform that are just too expensive for my company. i have purchased another product from a company that prints the forms to the laser perfectly but i am incapable of capturing them and saving them as pdf's for archiving/emailing/faxing and i don't much care for this company.
if anyone has any recomendations i would love to hear them.... i might ever consider hiring someone to write the needed script(s).

Thank you!

no one has any solutions so i decided to post my code. maybe someone has a better solution. this code works about 50% of the time and for the life of me i can't figure out why it fails..


### overlay form onto file
INFILE=$1
FORMFILE=$2
OUTFILE=$3
#rm $OUTFILE

#NEWFILE=`cat $INFILE|cut -c24-28`
#NEWFILE=${NEWFILE/ /}

sleep 1

#NEWFILE=/var/spool/cups-pdf/$USER/job_$NEWFILE-stdin.pdf

NEWFILE=/var/spool/cups-pdf/$USER/stdin.pdf
sleep 2

pdftk $NEWFILE background $FORMFILE output $OUTFILE

lp -dpl4 $OUTFILE
rm $INFILE

quit 0

i've discovered the problem but still need help with a solution......... the resulting file after i pdftk is seeing the & and @ characters as printer escape codes when those characters are in my print data. file1.pdf has no issue ignorring those characters and prints fine. only after i pdftk file1 to background file2 out put file3 is there a problem. temporary solution is to first creat a txt file, use sed to substitute those characters so the resulting file3 can print, but i need a better solution... i have to have the & and @ characters print just as they are supposed to... anyone have an idea how to accomplish this?