Letterhead, stamps and templates when the pre-printed paper runs out

Every small office has a cupboard with a box of headed paper in it. Someone ordered five hundred sheets four years ago, the logo has changed since, and the printer that used to feed it jams now. Meanwhile the contract needs sending this afternoon and it looks like it came out of a text editor, because it did.

The rubber stamp lives in the same drawer. PAID, COPY, RECEIVED, the one with the company details that goes on the back of delivery notes. It still works, as long as you print the document, stamp it, scan it back, and accept that the scan is now a photo of a page instead of a page.

None of that has to happen on paper. You can put a letterhead sheet, a stamp or a form template onto a PDF directly, and the Overlay two PDFs tool does it in your browser, without the file going anywhere.

What a small office actually stamps

Four jobs cover most of it.

Letterhead. One PDF page with the logo, the address, the tax number, whatever the footer says. It goes on every page of the document, and it belongs underneath the text, the way the ink sat under the typewriter.

A stamp. PAID across an invoice. COPY across a duplicate that shouldn’t be mistaken for the original. This one goes on top, usually faded so you can still read what’s underneath.

A form template. The blank form your process uses — the delivery note, the intake sheet, the inspection form — matched page for page against a document that carries only the data. Page one under page one, page two under page two.

A signature sheet. A single page that has to travel with a batch of documents, or a footer block that goes at the bottom of each page of an agreement.

Two of those repeat the same sheet on every page. One of them pairs pages one to one. That’s why the tool has both modes: repeat the first page of the overlay everywhere, or march through the pages in order. If the page counts don’t match in the second mode, the leftover pages of your document are left exactly as they were and you get told about it.

Behind is the setting nobody offers

Putting something on top of a PDF page is common. Putting it behind is not, and behind is what letterhead needs. A logo painted over your paragraphs is a watermark. A logo painted under them is stationery.

The reason most tools skip it comes down to how they work. The obvious way to get something behind your content is to build a new document, paint the letterhead first, then paste your original page on top of it. That works visually and wrecks everything else: your original page becomes a flat picture, and the links stop being clickable, the comments vanish, the form fields turn into a drawing of form fields.

There’s a better route. A PDF page doesn’t have to hold its instructions in one block — it can hold a list of them that the reader runs end to end, first to last, later paint covering earlier paint. So the overlay gets added as a new block and then moved to the front of that list. It gets painted first, your document lands on top of it, and not one byte of the original content is rewritten. Links still work. Annotations are still there. Form fields are still fillable, which matters if the thing you’re putting letterhead on is a form somebody has yet to complete.

The one case where behind won’t work

If the base page paints a solid background — a full-page white rectangle, which is what nearly every scan does — it will cover whatever you put behind it. The letterhead is there, sitting underneath, completely hidden.

There’s no trick that gets around this. The page really is painting over it, and the only fix would be to repaint the document, which is the thing we’re avoiding. Scans and letterhead don’t mix. If you’re stamping a scanned document, put the stamp on top and it’ll be fine.

What it costs in file size

In repeat mode the overlay is embedded once and reused on every page. A 200 KB letterhead across a 300-page report adds 200 KB to the file, not 60 MB. That surprises people who expect the logo to be pasted three hundred times, and it’s the difference between a report you can email and one you can’t.

The rest of the settings

Opacity goes from invisible to solid. A stamp at 30% reads as a stamp; at 100% it hides the line it lands on. Letterhead usually wants full opacity, since it’s underneath anyway.

Position is five options: centre or any of the four corners, flush to the edge. A full-page letterhead doesn’t care. A corner logo does.

Size. If the overlay page is bigger than the page it’s landing on, it’s scaled down to fit, keeping its proportions. It’s never scaled up, and the pages of your document never change size.

The layer stays a layer. The overlay doesn’t melt into your text. Both are selectable, both are separate. For a logo or a stamp that’s exactly right. If you wanted the two documents genuinely merged into one editable page, this isn’t that tool.

Where it fits with everything else

Stamping is the last step, usually. The invoice gets built, then the PAID goes on. The contract gets written, then the letterhead goes under it. If what you need is a diagonal DRAFT across every page rather than a full sheet of stationery, the watermark tool is the more direct route — it draws text or an image without needing a second PDF at all.

And the whole thing happens on your machine. The overlay tool reads both files into memory in the browser, does the work there, and hands you the result. A contract with a client’s name on it and a letterhead with your tax number don’t need to visit anyone’s server for the two to be put together. You don’t have to take that on faith either — here’s how to check a PDF site isn’t uploading your file. And if you’re the person doing all your own admin, the rest of the freelance paperwork works the same way.

The box of headed paper can stay in the cupboard.