Watermark

Add a watermark to selected pages of inFile. Have a look at some examples.

Watermarks may be stacked on top of each other. This allows for producing more complex page stamps - a mixture of text, images and foreign PDF page content. Using description you can configure various aspects like position, offset, rotation, scaling and opacity. For text based watermarks you can also configure font name, font size, fill color and render mode.

WARNING
A watermark resides in the background of a page. How much of the watermark will be rendered visible on a page depends on the layers on top and the transparency involved. This applies to PDF in general. Eg. scanned PDF files usually consist of bitmap images spanning whole pages and will hide anything in the background including any watermark. For these cases use pdfcpu stamp with an opacity < 1 instead to get a similar result.

Usage

pdfcpu watermark add    string | file description inFile [ outFile ] [flags]
pdfcpu watermark update string | file description inFile [ outFile ] [flags]
pdfcpu watermark remove inFile [ outFile ] [flags]

NOTE
In the Adobe world a watermark is text or an image that appears either in front of or behind existing document content, unlike a stamp comment aka stamp annotation that anybody reading the PDF can open, edit, move around and delete. The difference here is that a watermark is integrated into a PDF page as a fixed element. Within pdfcpu the meaning of these terms is slightly different:

• stamp is any accumulated content that appears in front of the existing page content - sitting on top of everything else on a page at a fixed position.

• watermark is any accumulated content that appears behind the existing page content - residing in the page background at a fixed position.

where content may be text, an image or a PDF page.

Flags

Common Flags

Arguments

Description

A configuration string to specify watermark parameters.

You may use parameter prefixes as long as the parameter can be identified. eg. o: .7 is ambiguous because there is opacity and offset but op: .7 will do the job.

Only one of rotation and diagonal is allowed.

The following description parameters are for text based watermarks only:

• fontname
• scriptname (for CJK fonts if you want to avoid font embedding)
• points
• aligntext
• strokecolor
• fillcolor (=color)
• bgcolor
• rendermode
• margins
• border
• rtl (for user fonts only)

Anchors for positioning

Default description

'f:Helvetica, points:24, rtl:off, scale:0.5 rel, pos:c, off:0 0, align:c, fillc:#808080, strokec:#808080, rot:0, d:1, op:1, mo:0, ma:0, bo:0'

The default watermark configuration is:

• fixed center page position (for ‘free’ positioning use pos:bl)
• scale factor 0.5 relative to page dimensions
• positive rotation along the diagonale from the lower left to the upper right page corner (d:1).
• fully opaque watermark by defining opacity 1

In addition for text based watermarks:

• font name Helvetica
• font size 24 points
• align: c
• stroke color gray (0.5 0.5 0.5)
• fill color gray (0.5 0.5 0.5)
• no background color and therefore no bounding box
• render mode fill (mo:0)
• margins 0
• border 0
• rtl off

You only have to specify parameters that differ from the default.

Examples

Text Based Watermarks

Create a watermark using defaults only:

$ pdfcpu watermark add 'This is a watermark' '' in.pdf out.pdf --mode text

$ pdfcpu watermark add --mode text -- 'This is a watermark' 'scale:1' in.pdf out.pdf

Create a watermark along the second diagonale using scale factor 0.9, default render mode fill and a fill color:

$ pdfcpu watermark add 'This is a watermark' 'scale:.9, d:2, c:.6 .2 .9' in.pdf out.pdf -m text

Create a watermark with 0 degree rotation using scale factor 0.9 and render mode stroke:

$ pdfcpu watermark add 'This is a watermark' 'scale:.9, rot:0, mo:1' in.pdf out.pdf --mode text

Create a watermark with a counterclockwise rotation of 45 degrees using scale factor 1, render mode fill & stroke and a fill color:

$ pdfcpu watermark add 'This is a watermark' 'scale:1, rot:45, mo:2, c:.2 .7 .9' in.pdf out.pdf --mode text

Create a watermark using some multi line text, show its bounding box by setting bgcol, set all margins to 5 and a border width of 7 rendering round corners.

$ pdfcpu watermark add 'Some multi\nline text' 'ma:5, bo:7 round .3 .7 .7, fillc:#3277d3, bgcol:#beded9, rot:0' in.pdf out.pdf -m text

Create a watermark with default rotation, using scale factor 1, font size 48, default render mode fill, a fill color and set opacity to 0.6:

$ pdfcpu watermark add 'Draft' 'points:48, scale:1, color:.8 .8 .4, op:.6' in.pdf out.pdf --mode text

$ pdfcpu watermark add 'Intentionally left blank' '' in.pdf out.pdf --mode text --pages even 

We also could have used pdfcpu stamp. There is really no difference since we apply only to empty pages here.

Image Based Watermarks

Create a watermark using defaults only:

$ pdfcpu watermark add 'pic.jpg' '' in.pdf out.pdf -m image

Create a watermark using 0 degree rotation and relative scaling of 1.0:

$ pdfcpu watermark add 'pic.jpg' 'scale:1 rel, rot:0' in.pdf out.pdf --mode image

Create a watermark using 0 degree rotation and absolute scaling of 1.0:

$ pdfcpu watermark add 'pic.jpg' 'scale:1 abs, rot:0' in.pdf out.pdf -m image

Create a watermark using a clockwise rotation of 30 degrees and absolute scaling of 1.0:

$ pdfcpu watermark add --mode image -- 'pic.jpg' 'rotation:-30, scalefactor:1 abs' in.pdf out.pdf

Create a watermark using a clockwise rotation of 30 degrees and absolute scaling of 0.25:

$ pdfcpu watermark add -m image -- 'pic.jpg' 'rot:-30, scale:.25 abs' in.pdf out.pdf

PDF Based Watermarks

Create a watermark using defaults only. This will apply page 1 of some.pdf:

$ pdfcpu watermark add 'some.pdf:1' '' in.pdf out.pdf --mode pdf

This is how to create a watermark using defaults and page 2 of some.pdf:

$ pdfcpu watermark add 'some.pdf:2' '' in.pdf out.pdf -m pdf