Abstract: Fixed and variable content is merged to produce personalized documents using a raster image processor that, for each page to be printed, initializes a frame buffer according to fixed content specified for the page. The fixed content may be specified in initialization information that is placed at the beginning of the stream of variable content to be processed or could be specified in some other manner. Such information may be specified through user input to a printer driver that processes documents to be printed from arbitrary applications into page descriptions used by the raster image processor. The specified fixed content may be preprocessed and stored in memory accessible to the raster image processor. The variable content then may be added to the frame buffer without the need to specify a region in which it should be placed.