66.25 PDF Watermarks

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To add a watermark to a PDF file we can use pdftk with it’s background, stamp, and multistamp operations.

The process begins by creating a single page PDF document containing the watermark.

The libreoffice Writer has an option to add a watermark to a page under the Format menu. The Watermark popup accepts some text and the defaults will place it in the middle of the page as grey text at 45 degrees. Export the document as pdf, perhaps calling it watermark.pdf.

Suppose the document you want to watermark is called survivor.pdf. To add the watermark as an underlay to each page of the pdf document:

pdftk survivor.pdf background watermark.pdf output survivor_watermarked.pdf

Some pdf documents contain image pages rather than text/structured pages and the background is occluded by the image. The stamp operation places the watermark on top of each page. This might also occluded parts of the original page.



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