in reply to Better way to add text to PDFs?

While not a perl solution, you may want to take a look at pdftk

From the webpage:

If PDF is electronic paper, then pdftk is an electronic staple-remover, hole-punch, binder, secret-decoder-ring, and X-Ray-glasses. Pdftk is a command-line tool for doing everyday things with PDF documents. Keep one in the top drawer of your desktop and use it to:

Pdftk allows you to manipulate PDF easily and freely. It does not require Acrobat, and it runs on Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, FreeBSD and Solaris.

Pdftk is free software (GPL).

TheStudent