Watermark a PDF without handing it to anyone
A watermark usually marks a document you are about to send on: "Confidential", "Draft", a recipient's name. Handing it to an online service to have that written on it is a contradiction — this is exactly the kind of document that should not travel.
Papyx writes the text across the pages, centred or tiled, at the angle and opacity you set. The stamp is structural: the page underneath is neither rendered nor recompressed.
- Reads
- Writes
- Engine
pdf-lib- Protected documents
- not supported
Add a watermark to a PDF, offline
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Open the document
One PDF or several, handled in the same run.
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Write the text
The word or phrase to stamp on every page.
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Set the look
Centred or tiled, angle and opacity as you like.
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Apply and save
The watermark is added on top, leaving the existing content alone.
Worth knowing
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Centred or tiled
A single stamp across the page, or a repeating pattern that is not easily cropped out.
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Angle and opacity
Two settings, enough for a watermark you can read without making the page unreadable.
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Non-destructive
The text is added to the page; what was already there is neither rendered nor recompressed.
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By the batch
A whole folder of PDFs takes the same watermark in one run.
Limits
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The watermark is text, not an image: Papyx does not stamp a logo.
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Stamps use Helvetica, a standard non-embedded font: extended Latin works, Cyrillic or Japanese does not.
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A watermark can be removed by anyone who knows their way around a PDF — it is a notice, not a protection.
Questions about “Watermark”
Can I use a logo as a watermark?
No: Papyx's watermark is text. A background image would have to be composed some other way.
Does the watermark work with accented characters?
Yes, extended Latin works. Non-Latin alphabets — Cyrillic, Japanese — do not, because stamps use the standard Helvetica font, which is not embedded in the document.
Is the document degraded by the watermark?
No. The text is added to the existing page; the content underneath is neither rasterized nor recompressed.