Add a watermark to PDF
Put a text watermark such as DRAFT, CONFIDENTIAL or COPY on every page of a PDF. Choose the size, how see-through it is, diagonal or centered, and gray, red or blue. It all runs in your browser, so your PDF is never uploaded.
How to watermark a PDF
Watermark a PDF without uploading it
A watermark tells everyone who opens a document what it is before they read a word: a DRAFT that should not be signed yet, a CONFIDENTIAL report that should not be forwarded, a SAMPLE of a design, or a COPY of an ID that you send to a landlord, perhaps with the landlord's name and the date, so it is harder to reuse somewhere else.
Many of those documents are exactly the kind you do not want to upload to a website. This tool adds the watermark in your browser instead. The PDF is read from your device, the watermark is written into a copy on your device, and the copy is saved back to it. One PDF of up to 60 MB and 500 pages can be marked at a time; a PDF that needs a password to open has to have the password removed first.
Write the watermark text
Type up to 60 characters; a counter under the box shows how many you have used. Short words like DRAFT stand out most, but a line such as "Copy for Smith Lettings, 25 October" works too. The text is written in a sans-serif font that covers the Latin, Greek and Cyrillic alphabets, so accented letters and words in languages such as Spanish, German, Greek, Bulgarian or Ukrainian come out as typed.
If the text contains characters the font cannot write, such as Chinese characters or emoji, the tool lists them and the Add watermark button waits until they are removed. That way the watermark never ends up with gaps or question marks in it.
Size, opacity, position and color
Position is Diagonal, the default, or Center. Diagonal runs the text from the bottom left toward the top right, through the middle of the page, at the angle of the page's own diagonal. Center lays it straight across the middle. Size is Small, Medium or Large: the text spans about 40, 60 or 80 percent of the page diagonal, or of the page width when centered, so it fits pages of every size and a long line gets a smaller font than a short word. A very short word stops growing before its letters get too tall for the page.
Opacity is 25, 50 or 75 percent, with 50 as the default. Lower values give a faint mark that hardly gets in the way of reading; 75 percent is hard to miss. The color can be gray, the default, red or blue. Each page is marked as it appears in a PDF reader, so landscape and rotated pages get a watermark that reads the right way up.
What a watermark does and does not do
Press Add watermark and the new file is ready in a moment. It is named after the original with -watermarked added, so contract.pdf becomes contract-watermarked.pdf, and the file you started with is not changed. The pages are not redrawn as pictures, so the text under the watermark can still be selected and searched.
A watermark is a label, not a lock. It is text placed on top of each page, and anyone with a PDF editor and some patience can remove it. It does not stop people from opening, printing or copying the file. If you also want page numbers, add page numbers to PDF works the same way, and flatten PDF fixes the filled-in fields of a form so they can no longer be changed.