PDF letterhead as document background

Question

My institution's letterhead is available as a PDF file. The PDF is not just of the logo (to be placed in a corner), but of the entire page. Is it possible to make this PDF the background of the first page of my document?

Answer 1

You can accomplish this with the wallpaper package. It has many options for creating background images that are tiled, centered, and scaled, on every page or only specific ones. In your case if the letterhead is contained in lh.pdf then you simply need

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{wallpaper}
\ULCornerWallPaper{1}{lh.pdf}
\begin{document}
  Your text on the letterhead
\end{document}

The key command in this case is of course \ULCornerWallPaper{<scale>}{<file>} that places the image contained in <file> in the upper-left corner, scaled by a factor of <scale>.

Answer 2

The package eso-pic allows to include a background image at each page but also on a single page.

Another option is to use the textpos package that can put a box at a position on the page behind the text. It can be used together with \includegraphics and a PDF file.

Answer 3

Here is a example with eso-pic, that uses frontpage.pdf for the first page and normalBackground.pdf for the rest.

First create 2 macros that can be used later.

\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{eso-pic}

\newcommand\BackgroundPicFront{
    \put(0,0){
        \parbox[b][\paperheight]{\paperwidth}{
            \vfill
            \centering
            \includegraphics[width=\paperwidth,height=\paperheight,keepaspectratio]{frontpage}%
            \vfill
        }
    }
}

\newcommand\BackgroundPic{
    \put(0,0){
        \parbox[b][\paperheight]{\paperwidth}{
            \vfill
            \centering
            \includegraphics[width=\paperwidth,height=\paperheight,keepaspectratio]{normalBackground}%
            \vfill
        }
    }
}

Then use those macros and don't forget to "clear"/"remove" the first background when you add the next background.

\AddToShipoutPicture{\BackgroundPicFront}
\ClearShipoutPicture
\AddToShipoutPicture{\BackgroundPic}

Have fun