PDF Watermark Generator

Settings that stay readable

A watermark should be obvious at a glance and still leave the page readable. Around 20–30% opacity in a mid grey is a good start; strong colours at full opacity make the text beneath hard to read and print badly. The 45-degree angle crosses the text diagonally instead of lining up with it, which makes the mark harder to crop out of a screenshot.

The text is placed as if it were horizontal and centred, then rotated around its starting point, so at an angle it sits up and to the right of the middle, and a long phrase at a large size can run off the page. Short words such as DRAFT or COPY fit best.

What a text watermark does not do

The watermark is ordinary text added on top of each page. Anyone with a PDF editor can select and delete it, and it also turns up when the text is copied or extracted. It labels a document; it does not protect one. If it must be hard to remove, compress PDF afterwards turns each page, watermark included, into a single image.

The built-in font covers Western European characters only, so watermark text in scripts such as Chinese, Arabic, or Cyrillic cannot be drawn.

How to use it

1. Select a PDF document.
2. Customize the watermark text, font size, opacity, color, and rotation angle.
3. Click Stamp & Save PDF to download the result.

Privacy & limitations

Your PDF is loaded and watermarked 100% inside your browser memory. No pages are sent to any external server.