Text or logo
A text watermark is best for status words like CONFIDENTIAL, DRAFT, COPY or PAID, and for marking a copy with the name of the person it was sent to. Text can be up to 60 characters in English or other languages written in Latin letters, with accents. Scripts such as Urdu, Hindi or Arabic aren’t supported by the built-in font, and the tool tells you which characters it can’t draw rather than leaving gaps.
An image watermark places your logo or stamp, from a PNG or JPG. PNG logos with a transparent background look cleanest.
Getting the look right
- Size for text runs from Small to Very large; for images it’s a share of the page width, from 20% to 90%.
- Angle: diagonal is hardest to crop out, straight is easiest to read.
- Opacity: Faint and Light keep the page readable; Solid is for stamps that must stand out.
- Position: the middle of the page, the top or bottom, or repeated across the whole page.
The preview shows the result on an A4 page as you change settings, and the real pages match it, including landscape pages and pages that were rotated in the original file.
What a watermark does and doesn’t do
A watermark is drawn onto each page, so it appears on screen, in print and in any copy made from the file. It discourages casual reuse and makes the status of a document obvious. It is not a lock: someone with PDF editing software can still remove it, and it doesn’t stop people opening the file. To control who can open a document, add a password with Password Protect PDF; using both is a sensible combination for sensitive files.
Your file is opened and processed in your browser, so it is never uploaded to a server.