Add Watermark to PDF

Tiled or single, and which to use

A single watermark sits once on the page in whichever of the nine positions you pick. Centre at a shallow angle is the classic look for DRAFT; a corner works when the watermark is a quiet ownership mark and you do not want it over the text.

Tiled repeats the text in a grid across the whole page. This is what you want for anything genuinely sensitive, because it cannot be cropped off and it survives a photograph of the screen. It is also the mode most free tools do not offer, which is why people end up applying a single watermark several times by hand.

Opacity is the setting that makes or breaks it. The default of 30% sits under the text and stays legible. Much higher and the document becomes hard to read; much lower and a watermark defeats its own purpose. Around 20–35% is the working range, a little lower for tiled since there is far more of it on the page.

More than one watermark

Add another and it gets its own card with its own settings. That covers the cases a single watermark cannot: a large faint DRAFT tiled across the page plus a small solid "Prepared for [client]" in the bottom corner, or a status stamp in one colour and a date in another. Each is positioned and styled independently, and they are all applied in the same pass.

Text only — no logo

This adds text. It does not place an image or a logo onto the page, and some other tools do. If you need a company logo watermarked onto a document, this is not the tool for the job, and it is better to know that now than after uploading.

What a watermark actually achieves

Worth being straight about. A watermark is a deterrent and a label, not a security control. It announces status — this is a draft, this is confidential, this came from me — and it makes casual reuse awkward and traceable. It does not stop a determined person, because watermarks can be removed with the right software.

So use it to communicate, and where a document genuinely must not be read by the wrong people, add a password as well. The two do different jobs and work well together.

Which pages

All pages is the default. First page only suits a cover-sheet stamp. A custom range like 1,3,5-8 is useful when only part of a document is restricted — an appendix with figures in it, say, in a report that is otherwise fine to circulate.

Related tools

Protect PDF adds a password, which is the actual protection a watermark only signals. Merge PDF combines documents before you stamp the result, and Compress PDF reduces the finished file for emailing.