using pdftk to apply a watermark

Sadly, it looks like PrimoPDF can't apply a watermark to conversions. A forum post indicated that there's a paid version that does watermarks, but the prices listed at the given links were boggling. Naturally, I thought of the power-packed pdftk, and yes it has that feature.

http://forums.primopdf.com/showthread.php?t=1788

However, the really interesting thing that I stumbled upon was the following post about problems with pdftk for this feature, and how this guy completely figured out what the bug was an how to work around it:

http://rhodesmill.org/brandon/2009/pdf-watermarks-upside-down/

how to work around the uncontrollable page rotation with PrimoPDF

PrimoPDF is a great tool, but for some applications when appending pages from multiple prints it forces rotation of previous pages so that the whole document ends up looking like a pinwheel. This seems to have something to do with the application that generated the page; even appending previously converted PDFs together by printing from Adobe Reader results in the stupid rotation.

I had a solution to this at one time, but didn't document it.

Lacking that information, I now use pdf toolkit to do the appending from a DOS window.

http://www.accesspdf.com/pdftk/