Add a watermark to a PDF

A watermark is a sentence printed across a document: this copy is not final, or it is not for circulation. This puts your own words over every page, at the angle and opacity you set, without touching what is underneath.

How it works

1. Add your PDFDrop the document. The first page appears so you can judge the angle, the size and how heavy the watermark looks against the real page.
2. Set the watermarkOpen Watermark, tick it, and type the words. Size, colour, angle and opacity are all adjustable, and the preview redraws as you change them.
3. ProcessThe watermark is written onto every page and offered as a new download. Your original file is untouched.

What a watermark does — and does not do

It is worth being plain about this, because watermarks are usually sold as protection and they are not. A watermark laid over a page is a statement: this copy is a draft, this copy belongs to this client, this copy is not for distribution. It discourages casual forwarding and it makes an accidental leak traceable to a version, which is genuinely useful.

It does not prevent copying, and it does not stop anyone who is determined. The overlay is drawn on top of the page, so somebody with an editor can paint over it or crop around it, and a screenshot ignores it completely. If what you need is a document that cannot be changed or copied, that is a permissions and signatures problem, not a watermark problem.

Getting it to look like a watermark and not like a mistake

The default angle gives the classic diagonal across the page, which reads as deliberate. A horizontal line of text across the middle of a paragraph reads as a typo instead, because it collides with the text rather than crossing it.

Opacity does most of the work. Light enough and the page still reads normally with the mark visible; too light and it vanishes over a photograph or a dark heading; too heavy and the document becomes annoying to read, which is how a watermark gets ignored. Pale grey or a muted colour usually beats a saturated one, and a size that spans most of the page beats a size that could be mistaken for a heading.

When a watermark is the right answer

Review copies of a contract or a proposal, so that a version that comes back with notes cannot be mistaken for the final. Client-facing drafts of a report or a quotation. Examination papers and training material that have to move between people before they are used. Internal documents that should not travel outside the organisation — CONFIDENTIAL across the page does more than a line in the footer, because it cannot be missed.

It applies to every page at once, which is what these jobs want and what the tool does. There is no per-page watermark, and there is no attempt to detect whether a page already carries one.

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