Add a DRAFT watermark to a PDF, one that shows on screen and on paper

Which settings read as a watermark?

The tool starts with the settings most documents need: diagonal, grey, at 20 % strength, medium size. Change the text and you are done. The options, in the words the panel uses:

• Text: DRAFT, CONFIDENTIAL, COPY, or your own words. It starts filled with CONFIDENTIAL.
• Across: Diagonal runs corner to corner; Straight runs across the middle.
• Colour: Grey, Red or Blue.
• Strength: Faint (10 %), Light (20 %), Medium (35 %) or Strong (50 %). This is how much the mark covers what is under it.
• Size: Small, Medium or Large, a share of the page’s diagonal (or its width, for Straight). The text is sized to each page, so A4, Letter and landscape pages look alike.
• Pages: all, or ranges such as 1-3, 7.

What reads well over body text, from trying the combinations on a typed lease: grey at Light for documents people still need to read, Medium for a draft that must not be mistaken for the final, red only when the mark is a warning. Strong at 50 % starts to fight with the text it covers.

(Computed from the tool’s own sizing for an A4 page; a longer word gets smaller letters, because it has to fit the same span.)

How do I add the watermark, step by step?

1. Drop the PDF on the tool above, or press it and pick the file. Several files, or a whole folder, work too: each file gets the same watermark.
2. Type the text in Text. Capitals read best from a distance.
3. Pick the look: Diagonal or Straight, a Colour, a Strength and a Size.
4. Choose the pages. Leave all, or type a range, such as 2- to leave a cover page clean.
5. Press Add watermark. The result line says, for example, Added “DRAFT” across 12 pages, as see-through real text over the content. The file is named after yours with -watermarked added; the original is not touched.
6. Download PDF, open it, and check one page in print preview.

Why do some watermarks vanish when printed?

Some tools add a watermark as an annotation: a stamp that sits on top of the page in a separate layer. Viewers and print dialogs can be set to skip annotations (“print the document” without “comments and markups”), and the watermark quietly disappears on paper.

Watermark PDF does not add an annotation. It writes the words into the page content, the same place the page’s own text lives, with a see-through setting. Anything that draws the page draws the watermark: Acrobat, Preview, Chrome, Edge and the printer driver. Our test files come out with no annotations at all on a watermarked page.

To check before you print 40 copies, open the result, press Ctrl+P (Cmd+P on a Mac) and look at the preview. If the mark is there, it prints.

Behind the text or in front of it?

There is no “behind” setting here: the mark always goes over the content, see-through. That is deliberate, and it matters most for scans. A scanned page is 1 big picture; a watermark placed behind it is hidden by the picture and never shows. Over the content at 20 % it shows on scans and typed pages alike.

The cost: on a dense page, the mark slightly tints the text it crosses. If that bothers you, step down to Faint, or use Straight with a Small size, which crosses fewer lines.

Things worth knowing before you send it

• The watermark is real text. It can be selected, and a search for DRAFT finds it. When someone copies a paragraph, the word may come along. For most drafts that is a feature.
• Latin letters only. The standard PDF font the tool uses covers Western European letters. Text with ł, ř or Cyrillic letters stops with a message saying so; add such words in the editor, which embeds a font that has them.
• A signed PDF gets a warning. Adding a watermark writes a new copy, which a digital signature no longer covers. The tool tells you when the file was signed.
• A PDF/A file stops meeting PDF/A. The mark uses a standard font that is not embedded, which the archive format does not allow; the tool warns when the file says it is PDF/A. Watermark first, then make the PDF/A.
• Page numbers and running text are a different tool. For a DRAFT line in the header of every page instead of across it, use Add page numbers, which has Header and Footer fields. The guide on editing headers and footers covers changing text that is already there.

The honest part: a watermark is a label, not a lock

A watermark tells honest readers what the document is. It does not stop anyone else. Anyone with a PDF editor can click the watermark and delete it, ours included, because it is ordinary text on the page. The result card says it too: a watermark marks a document; it does not lock it.

If the draft must not be changed, add a password that restricts editing with Protect PDF, and know its limits: the guide on restricting editing and printing explains what those restrictions do and do not stop. If the draft must not leak at all, the answer is who you send it to, not what is printed on it. PDF privacy and protection puts the options side by side.

A few more limits: the tool adds text marks only, no logo picture and no tiled pattern; a logo goes on page by page in the editor. Every mark is centred on the page; for a stamp in a corner, see stamping PAID on an invoice.

What it gets right: the file barely grows (under 0.5 KB on a 1-page invoice, 117 KB to 246 KB on a 500-page report, done in under a second in our test run), text stays selectable, and nothing leaves your device. You can check that last part: run the tool once, turn Wi-Fi off, and run it again.