Add Letterhead to PDF (Overlay / Background)

About the Add Letterhead to PDF (Overlay / Background)

Put your company letterhead behind the pages of a letter, quotation or report — like printing it on pre-printed stationery, but in the PDF. Choose the document and the letterhead, check the preview and, with a Premium pass, download the result.

A PDF letterhead is added as vector content (a Form XObject), not as a picture: its text, lines and logo stay sharp at any zoom and in print, and both the letterhead’s text and yours stay selectable and searchable. Letterheads usually have a fuller first page and a simpler continuation page, so you can give following pages another page of the letterhead file, a different file, or nothing. The same tool puts a background, frame or stamp on top of pages, with an opacity. Everything happens in your browser; neither file is uploaded. Without a pass, the free preview carries a MySmartCoPilot watermark: the live view of every page with your letterhead, and the first pages of the finished PDF as watermarked page images.

Common uses

• Sending letters, quotations and invoices on company stationery without printing on paper first.
• Giving documents exported from Word, Google Docs or an accounting system your official header and footer.
• Putting a background, frame or certificate border behind generated pages.
• Stamping “PAID”, a seal or a logo on top of pages with an opacity.

Behind the content or on top

Behind the content draws the letterhead first, so the document’s own text and graphics are drawn over it — exactly like pre-printed stationery. It shows through wherever the page is transparent, which is the case for documents exported from word processors. Some pages paint an opaque background first (scans, photos, pages with a coloured or white background shape); a letterhead behind those is hidden, and the preview tells you when a page is like that.

On top draws the letterhead after everything else. Use it for stamps, seals and borders, or for pages with an opaque background; lower the opacity so the content stays readable.

Sizes, scaling and position

• Fit page makes the letterhead as large as the page allows while keeping its proportions — the right choice when both are the same paper size.
• Stretch makes it exactly the size of each page; proportions change when the sizes differ.
• Actual size keeps the letterhead’s own size (an A4 letterhead stays 210 × 297 mm); an image has no printed size, so for images it is the same as Fit page.
• Custom sets a percentage, for logos and stamps.

The nine-point grid places the letterhead on the page; the offsets move it further in millimetres. Rotated pages (pages turned with /Rotate) and pages with a crop box get the letterhead the right way up on the area you see.

Why a PDF letterhead is better than an image

A PDF letterhead keeps vector text and lines, so it prints crisply and its text can be selected, searched and read by screen readers. An image letterhead works too, but its sharpness depends on its pixel size: a full A4 page needs about 2480 × 3508 pixels for 300 dpi print quality. If you only have the letterhead as a Word template or an image, you can design a vector one with the Letterhead Maker.

Limitations

• Password-protected or restricted PDFs (the document or the letterhead) can’t be changed. Remove the protection with Unlock PDF first.
• Changing a digitally signed PDF makes its signatures show as invalid; add the letterhead before signing.
• Links and form fields of the letterhead file are not copied — only what its page shows.
• A letterhead behind the content can’t show through pages that have an opaque background; use On top with a lower opacity for those.
• Very large files need plenty of memory; on phones, smaller files work best.

Privacy

Everything happens in your browser. What you enter or open here is not uploaded or stored by MySmartCoPilot.