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Watermark PDF
Watermark PDF — Free Online Tool
Place text or an image on your pages, drag it exactly where you want it, and download the stamped PDF.
About Watermark PDF
A watermark is how a PDF says what it is before anyone reads a word of it: DRAFT, CONFIDENTIAL, a client's logo, a copy number. This tool puts one on your pages without uploading anything. Drop a PDF, choose a text mark or a PNG or JPEG image, and place it on the rendered first page — drag the ring where you want it, or type exact percentages across and down, or move it with the arrow keys. The two number fields and the drag are the same pair of numbers, so a keyboard reaches every position a mouse does. Position is a share of each page rather than a fixed measurement, so the mark lands in the same relative spot on a document whose pages are not all one size, and it is measured against the page as your reader sees it: a cropped page, a page whose box does not start at zero, and a page the reader turns ninety degrees are all handled. Size, colour, boldness, opacity and rotation are yours; tick tile and the mark repeats twelve times on a fixed grid, which is the classic diagonal look, and the anchor is then ignored. Tick place under the page content and your text and pictures print over the top of it instead. Stamp every page, only the first, only the last, or a range like 1-3, 5, 8-10. Two things worth knowing before you start. Text is drawn with a standard PDF font, which covers Latin letters, digits and punctuation including accents, curly quotes and the euro sign, but cannot draw Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic or emoji; the tool checks as you type and names any character it cannot draw rather than failing at the end. And the mark becomes part of the page's own drawing instructions, not a note clipped to it, so it survives printing and re-saving and nothing here can peel it off again. That is a label, not a lock: the page underneath is untouched, its text stays selectable, and a PDF editor can still remove the mark. Everything else in your document is left alone — bookmarks, links, form fields and the title all survive, because the file is re-saved rather than rebuilt from copies.
Questions
Can the watermark be removed from the file I download?
Not by anything on this site, and not by re-saving the PDF. The mark is written into the page's own drawing instructions — the same place its text and pictures live — so it prints, copies and converts along with them. That is not the same as protection. The page underneath is untouched, its text stays selectable, and anyone with a real PDF editor can open the page content and take the mark out. Treat a watermark as a label on a document, not a lock on one.
Why can't I use Chinese, Cyrillic or emoji in the watermark text?
Because a text mark is drawn with one of the PDF standard fonts, and those only carry the WinAnsi character set. That is more than it sounds — every Latin letter, digit and piece of punctuation, plus accented letters, curly quotes, em dashes and the euro sign — but Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Cyrillic, Greek, Arabic and emoji have no glyph to draw at all. Rather than let the run fail at the end, the tool checks what you type and names the exact characters it cannot draw. The way round it is an image mark: set the words in a program that has the font, export a PNG with a transparent background, and place that instead.
What does “place under the page content” actually do?
It draws the mark before everything your page already draws, so your body text and pictures land on top of it rather than the other way round — the look most people mean by a watermark. On a page with a solid white background that will hide the mark wherever the two overlap, and on a mostly empty page it looks much the same as drawing on top. The preview cannot show the difference, because the page behind it is one flat picture with nothing to slide underneath, so open the download to check.
My logo is a photo from a phone and it lands sideways. What is going on?
A phone JPEG usually stores its pixels one way up and records a rotation tag telling viewers to turn them. PDFs ignore that tag completely: inside a PDF an image is simply its stored grid of samples, and where it sits is decided by the page, not by anything in the picture. So this tool clears the tag before anything decodes the file, which makes the preview and the download agree — what you see placed on the page is exactly what gets embedded. If that is the wrong way up, open the picture in any editor, save it with the rotation actually applied, and drop it in again.
Is the watermark text still searchable in the result?
Yes. A text mark is real text rather than a picture of text, so a reader can select it, search for it and copy it, and PDF to Text on this site lists it alongside the page's own words. That is usually what you want — a document you can find by searching for “CONFIDENTIAL”. If you would rather it were not selectable, use an image mark instead: an embedded PNG or JPEG carries no text at all.
Is my file uploaded to a server?
No. Transmute processes everything locally in your browser using JavaScript and WebAssembly. Your files never leave your device — there is no server, no upload, no cloud processing.