Add Watermark to PDF

About the Add Watermark to PDF

Add a watermark to a PDF: a word such as CONFIDENTIAL or DRAFT, your own text, or an image such as a company logo. Choose the font, size, colour, opacity and angle, put it in one of nine positions or repeat it across the page, and decide whether it sits over the page content or behind it. The preview shows the selected page exactly as it will be saved.

The watermark is written into the PDF as real content — text stays text and images keep their resolution — so pages are not turned into pictures and the file stays sharp and searchable. If you want the watermark to be harder to remove, you can flatten the pages to images instead. Everything happens in your browser: the PDF is never uploaded.

Common uses

• Marking documents CONFIDENTIAL before sharing them with a vendor, client or recruiter.
• Sending DRAFT versions of contracts, reports and proposals for review.
• Stamping invoices or receipts as PAID, or forms as APPROVED.
• Adding “Copy for <name> — <date>” to ID proofs you submit, so a copy can’t easily be reused for something else.
• Branding handouts, brochures or price lists with your logo.

Over or under the content

Over content draws the watermark on top of everything on the page, so it is always visible. With a low opacity (20–40%) the text underneath stays readable.

Under content puts the watermark behind the page’s text and images, like a background. It only shows where the page itself is transparent — on scanned pages, photos or pages with a coloured background it is hidden completely. The preview tells you when that happens.

Text, tokens and fonts

Up to four lines of text. These tokens are replaced on each page:

• {page} — the page number (1, 2, 3 …)
• {total} — the number of pages in the file
• {date} — today’s date, in the format you choose
• {filename} — the file name without “.pdf”

Helvetica, Times and Courier are the standard PDF fonts every reader has; they cover English and Western European letters. For ₹, letters such as Ł or Ş, Greek or Cyrillic, choose Noto Sans, which is embedded in the file (only the characters you use). Scripts that need text shaping, such as Devanagari or Tamil, can’t be drawn as text yet — use an image of the text instead.

How hard is a watermark to remove?

A normal watermark is a separate object in the PDF. That keeps the file small and sharp, but someone with a PDF editor can select and delete it. Flatten pages to images renders each page — with its watermark — into a single picture, so there is nothing separate to delete. The catch: text is no longer selectable or searchable, links and form fields stop working, and the file is usually larger. Removal becomes harder, not impossible: image editing can still paint over a watermark.

Limitations

• Password-protected or restricted PDFs can’t be changed. Remove the protection first with Unlock PDF (you’ll need the password).
• Adding a watermark changes the file, so existing digital signatures will show as invalid. Watermark before signing, or keep the signed original.
• Text in scripts that need shaping (Devanagari, Tamil, Arabic …) isn’t supported as text; use an image watermark instead.
• Very large files (hundreds of megabytes) need plenty of memory; on phones, smaller files work best.
• Tiling is limited to 1,500 copies per page, so a very small watermark with no spacing asks you to make it larger or space it out (the file would otherwise get heavy and slow to open).

Privacy

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