How can I add a background to every page except the first?

Question

I want to make a company letterhead in LaTeX (example output here), and I did it using fancyhdr and absolute positioning, which, while horrible, worked fine so far.

I must have updated XeLaTeX, because now every page after the second is broken. It used to give me warnings about badboxes, but everything worked fine. I think the badboxes were because the "background" image was really in the foreground, and the text was just forcefully positioned over it.

What I want to do is:

1. Create a title page with \maketitle that doesn't include a background image.
2. Include a background image on every other page.
3. Create a "back cover" page (using \makeback) that doesn't include the background image.

I tried the wallpaper package, but it can only set a wallpaper on every page. I tried the xwatermark package, but it complains about something called undefined name grey!55, which I have no idea about. How can I accomplish what I need?

Answer 1

If you start your document with the title on page 1, the following is enough:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{eso-pic}
\usepackage{ifthen}

\title{foobar}
\usepackage{lipsum}
\begin{document}
\maketitle
\AddToShipoutPictureBG{\ifthenelse{\isodd{\value{page}}}{}{\includegraphics{backgroundimage.pdf}}}
\lipsum[1-30]
\end{document}

I don't know about the \makeback macro, so I can't tell you anything about that.

Answer 2

I recommend another kind of solution. Use the background as a separate pdf and use pdftk to "stamp" the pdf generated with TeX. With the multistamp option, you should use a two page pdf as option, where the first page is empty and the second contains your background. The multistamp option was introduced with pdftk 1.44 (AFAIK) and some linux distributions have the older version 1.41 included.