Watermark PDF

Stamp text across every page of a PDF — diagonal, tiled or along the footer.

This tool runs entirely in your browser. Your data is never uploaded, never stored, and never leaves your device.

This stamps a word or phrase across every page of a PDF — diagonally, tiled, or along the footer — at whatever opacity and colour you choose, so a copy can be marked DRAFT, CONFIDENTIAL, or with the name of whoever received it.

How to use it

1Open the PDF and type the text you want stamped.
2Pick a layout: one across the page, tiled repeatedly, or a discreet line along the bottom.
3Set the size, colour and opacity — 20 to 30 per cent stays readable underneath.
4Press Add Watermark and download the marked copy.

Example

Input: A contract with 'DRAFT — NOT FOR SIGNATURE', diagonal, grey, 25%
Output: Every page carrying the phrase corner-to-corner behind the text, still fully readable

The text underneath stays selectable and searchable — the watermark is drawn over it, not baked into a picture of the page.

What happens to your data

This tool runs entirely in your browser. Your input is never uploaded to a server, never stored, and never logged. Contracts and drafts are precisely the documents that should not be uploaded anywhere to be marked.

Last updated August 2026

A watermark says something about a copy that the copy cannot say about itself: that it is a draft, that it is confidential, that it was sent to a particular person on a particular day. It is the cheapest way to stop a working version being mistaken for a final one.

This stamps text across every page of a PDF. Diagonal across the middle, tiled repeatedly, or a quiet line along the footer — with the colour, size and opacity under your control, because a watermark that hides the document is as useless as no watermark at all.

Decide which of two marks you want first, because they behave differently on the page. A mark meant to be caught at a glance — DRAFT, CONFIDENTIAL — wants to be large and to cross the content, so it cannot be cropped out of a screenshot without taking the words with it. A mark meant to be read deliberately, closer to a label than a warning, wants the footer, where it sits out of the way of every line.

What you cannot choose is which pages: the stamp goes on all of them, and on one file at a time, so five differently named copies means five runs.

How it works

Toolvore embeds a bold Helvetica face and draws your text over each page's existing content at the opacity you choose. The diagonal layout is offset back along its own 45-degree line by half the text width, so the phrase sits centred rather than drifting off the corner — and the tiled layout steps by the measured width of your text, so the spacing holds whether you stamp one word or a sentence. The text underneath stays selectable, because the watermark is drawn over the page rather than the page being flattened into an image. The face is one of PDF's standard fourteen, so the character set stops at WinAnsi: Latin letters, accents and punctuation are drawn, while Cyrillic, Greek, Chinese or an emoji stop the run with an error instead of being quietly dropped. The footer ignores the size you typed and takes a third of it, held between 6 and 36 points, so the default 54 prints an 18-point line. Tiling begins beyond the page edge, which is why partial phrases at the margins are the design rather than a fault.

Common use cases

Marking a contract DRAFT — NOT FOR SIGNATURE before circulating it for comment
Stamping CONFIDENTIAL across a document going to an external reviewer
Adding a recipient's name to each copy of a document sent to several parties
Labelling a superseded version so it is not picked up by mistake
Putting a date or a version string in the footer of every page
Writing 'copy supplied for tenancy application only' across a scan of an identity document
Marking a blank template SPECIMEN so it is not filled in and returned as the real thing

Frequently asked questions

Does a watermark protect my document?＋

No, and it is important to be clear about that. A watermark is a visual mark that anyone with a PDF editor can remove. It deters casual reuse and labels a copy; it is not a security control and should not be relied on as one.

Can I still select the text underneath?＋

Yes. The watermark is drawn as an additional layer over the existing content, so the document's own text remains selectable, searchable and accessible to screen readers.

What opacity should I use?＋

Between 20 and 30 per cent generally reads clearly as a watermark while leaving the document comfortable to read. Above about 50 per cent it starts to compete with the content.

Can I use an image or logo instead of text?＋

Not currently — this stamps text only. A logo watermark needs the image embedded and scaled per page size, which is a different tool.

Does it work on scanned PDFs?＋

Yes. The watermark is drawn over whatever the page contains, whether that is text or a scanned image.

How do I remove a watermark from a PDF?＋

That depends on how the mark got there, and this tool only adds one. A watermark drawn as text over the page — which is what this produces — is an object in the file, so a full PDF editor can select it and delete it. A watermark that has been flattened into the page, or that arrived as part of a scan, is not an object at all: it is part of the picture, and removing it means editing pixels and guessing at what was underneath. If the document is yours, going back to the unmarked original is the honest answer rather than unpicking the copy.

Can I watermark a password-protected PDF?＋

Not until the protection is off. The file is opened with no allowance made for encryption, so a password-protected PDF is turned away the moment you drop it, with a message saying it may be encrypted or corrupted — the same message a genuinely damaged file gets, which is worth remembering when you are working out which of the two you have. Open it in a reader that will take the password, save an unprotected copy and stamp that. PDF has two kinds of password, one to open a document and one restricting printing and editing, and either can stop a file being read.

What should a watermark actually say?＋

Fewer words than people expect. A single word — DRAFT, COPY, CONFIDENTIAL — reads at a glance across a page and is enough when the only job is to stop a working version being taken for the final one. Anything longer is really a label, and labels are read up close rather than at a distance, which changes where they should sit. Width is the practical limit: a long phrase set large runs off the edges of the page and is clipped there, since the diagonal is centred rather than scaled to fit. Give a sentence a smaller size, or put it along the bottom where it stays horizontal and legible.

Will the watermark show up when the document is printed?＋

Yes. It is drawn into the page's own content rather than attached as an annotation or a comment, so it prints as it appears and there is no viewer setting that leaves it out. What changes between screen and paper is how light it looks: a pale grey that reads clearly on a backlit display can come out faint from a laser printer, and fainter still on a photocopy of that print, while greyscale printing flattens the red and blue options into grey as well. If the mark has to survive being printed and passed on, test a single page before committing to a hundred.