Adding Source of Document as Footnote with External Files

Question

I have a beamer presentation where I am including a set of external slides using includepdf from pdfpages. I want to be able to add a footnote to each of these external slides, which attributes them to the correct source. Is there a way to do it in LaTeX?

Answer 1

I know that the pdfpages has some pagecommand option. This here is unsatisfactory, but works for the moment:

\includepdf[pages=-,pagecommand={\thispagestyle{empty}\footnote{X}}]{PP.pdf}

The problem is that it typesets the small 1 somewhere.

You can surely generate some other kind of overlay over the pdf image. Such an overlay would require some kind of absolute or relative positioning and it would use custom formatting rather than the way \footnote works.

I am aware of two approaches for absolute positioning: tikz with its overlay option or the textpos package.

Here is what I found in my notes for the tikz approach (copy to your preamble):

\tikzset{
    every overlay node/.style={
        draw=black,fill=white,rounded corners,anchor=north west,
    },
}
% Usage:
% \tikzoverlay at (-1cm,-5cm) {content};
% or
% \tikzoverlay[text width=5cm] at (-1cm,-5cm) {content};
\def\tikzoverlay{%
    \tikz[baseline,overlay]\node[every overlay node]
}%

This allows you to write

\includepdf[pages=-,pagecommand={\thispagestyle{empty}\tikzoverlay at (0cm,-5cm) {copied from somewhere};}]{PP.pdf}%

Note that \tikzoverlay might be interesting in other occasions as well. For your application, you may want to adjust the every overlay style (leave out draw=black for example).

The textpos package will also do the job, but personally, I always found tikz much more flexible, easier to use, and prettier.