Add Watermark to PDF

1. 1Add the PDF you want to mark.
2. 2Type the wording, then pick a placement — diagonal reads clearly, tiled is hardest to crop away.
3. 3Set the opacity and size, and limit it to certain pages if you need to.
4. 4Press Add watermark, check the preview of the saved file, and download.

The wording is drawn into each page as real text in the standard Helvetica Bold font, using a transparency setting rather than a semi-transparent picture. That keeps the file small, keeps the original text underneath selectable, and keeps the mark sharp at any zoom level.

Diagonal placement measures the angle of the page itself with an arctangent of its height over its width, so the wording runs corner to corner whether the page is portrait, landscape or an unusual size. Tiled placement repeats the wording on a grid at a shallow angle, which is much harder to crop out than a single mark.

Opacity is a real PDF graphics-state value, so it prints exactly as it looks on screen. A watermark is a visual label, not a security control: anyone with a PDF editor can remove it, so it marks a document as a draft or a copy rather than protecting it.

The file is read into your browser's memory, changed there, and handed straight back to you. Nothing is uploaded, so there is no queue and no copy sitting on a server afterwards.

• Use tiled placement when the watermark is meant to discourage reuse. A single diagonal mark is easy to crop out of a screenshot; a repeated pattern is not.
• Keep the opacity low enough that the document underneath is still comfortable to read.
• Short wording works best: DRAFT, CONFIDENTIAL, COPY, or a name and date.
• A watermark labels a document; it does not hide anything. To remove text for good, use Redact PDF.

• How to watermark a PDF — draft, confidential or copy
• How to add a header or footer to every page of a PDF