Add Watermark

Stamp Text Across Every Page of a PDF

Type a word or phrase, choose where it sits and how faint it is, and it is drawn onto every page of the document. DRAFT, CONFIDENTIAL, a client name, a date, a case reference — whatever needs to be visible on the paper without being part of the content.

Five settings, one stamp

Text. One line, Latin characters. This is the whole of the input.

Position. Centre, or any of the four corners. The corner options are placed with a proper inset from the page edge, so the stamp does not collide with the trim and does not disappear when printed.

Opacity. 5% to 80%. This is the setting that decides whether the result looks professional or ruins the page.

Size. 12 pt to 96 pt. A 96 pt word spans most of an A4 page width; 12 pt is footnote-sized and suits a corner reference.

Angle. −90° to +90°. Zero is horizontal. Around 45° is the diagonal look people picture when they hear "watermark", and it works because a diagonal line crosses more of the page than a horizontal one at the same font size.

Picking an opacity that works

Most bad watermarks are too dark. The text underneath has to stay comfortable to read, and a stamp at 50% opacity fights it.

• 8-15% — a large diagonal on a white text page. Clearly visible, still easy to read through. This is the range to start in.
• 20-30% — a small corner mark, or a page with a lot of white space.
• 40%+ — deliberately obstructive. Choose this when you want a preview copy to be awkward to use, and accept that it looks heavy.

Print a test page before doing a hundred-page document. Screens are backlit and paper is not; a stamp that looks right at 10% on a monitor often prints paler than expected.

What this does not do

Three limits worth knowing before you start:

Text only. There is no image or logo upload. If you need a company mark rather than a word, this will not do it, and a desktop editor or an export from the source application will.

Every page, no exceptions. There is no page selection. To stamp only part of a document, split it with Extract Pages, watermark the extract, and reassemble with Merge PDF.

One stamp per page. No tiling, no repeating grid across the sheet.

Non-Latin text is refused at the outset with a message saying so, rather than drawn as empty boxes.

A watermark is a label, not a lock

The stamp is drawn into the page content, so it cannot be toggled off in a reader and it survives printing, screenshotting and most conversions. That makes it good at what it is for: making a document's status obvious at a glance, and making a leaked copy traceable to whoever it was issued to.

It is not protection. Anyone with a PDF editor can cover it, crop it, or rebuild the page without it, and there is no undo button here that does it for them either — once you download the stamped file, the mark is part of the pages. Keep the clean original.

If the goal is to stop the wrong person reading the document at all, that is encryption, and Protect PDF does it. A watermark and a password address different problems, and using one where you needed the other is a common and expensive mistake.

Files up to 100 MB, processed in the tab. Encrypted PDFs are refused at upload — decrypt with Unlock PDF first.