Abstract: In desk top publishing or professional printing, the need exists to print a set of documents which have a generally identical background image and differ from each other by a small area, a page specific image region. A method is described to locate each page specific image region in a background image page layout. A master file stores this background image information along with positional parameters and a file reference to the page specific image region data. The page specific data are stored in one or more data files, generated by a database application program. The master file and page specific file are combined such that the background image is transformed to a bitmap only once, and the page specific data variously modify this bitmap to represent each individual page.