Adobe Acrobat 8 Standard

Add and edit watermarks

A watermark is text or an image that appears either above or behind existing document content, similar to a stamp. For example, you might want to apply a “Confidential” watermark to pages with sensitive information. You can add multiple watermarks to a PDF, and you can specify the page or range of pages on which each watermark appears.

Note: Unlike a stamp, a watermark is integrated into PDF pages as a fixed element. A stamp is a type of PDF comment, which others reading the PDF may open to display a text annotation, move, change, or delete.
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Before and after adding a watermark

Add or replace a watermark

You can add multiple watermarks to a PDF, but each one must be added separately.

  1. Choose Document > Watermark > Add. If the PDF already contains one or more watermarks, a message appears; select Add New if you want to create an additional watermark, or select Replace Existing if you want to replace all existing watermarks with a new one.
  2. (Optional) To apply the watermark selectively to individual pages, click Page Range Options, select Pages From, and enter beginning and ending page numbers; then choose a Subset option for applying the watermark only to odd pages, even pages, or both.
  3. Specify the Source option:

    • To create a text watermark, select Text, type the text you want to appear as the watermark in the text box, and then adjust the font, font size, font color, underlining, and paragraph-alignment options, as needed.

    • To use an image as a watermark, select File. Then click Browse, locate the image file you want to use, select it, and click Open. If the file has multiple pages with images, click the Page Number up and down arrows to select the page you want.

    Note: Only PDF, JPEG, and BMP images can be used as watermarks.
  4. To change the size of an image watermark, do one of the following:

    • To resize the watermark in relation to the actual size of the original image file, enter a percentage in the Absolute Scale option (in the Source area of the dialog box).

    • To resize the watermark in relation to the PDF page dimensions, enter a percentage in the Scale Relative To Target Page (in the Appearance area of the dialog box).

  5. Adjust the appearance of the text or image watermark, as needed:

    • To rotate the watermark, select an angle of rotation or enter a custom value.

    • To give the watermark some transparency, drag the Opacity slider or enter a percentage.

    • To stack the watermark relative to the page content, select Appear Behind Page (page content overprints the watermark) or Appear On Top Of Page (watermark overprints the page content).

    • To specify when the watermark appears, click Appearance Options and select or deselect Show When Printing and Show When Displaying On Screen.

    • To control variations in a PDF with pages of varying sizes, click Appearance Options and select or deselect Keep Position And Size Of Watermark Text Constant When Printing On Different Page Sizes.

  6. Specify the position in which you want the watermark to appear by entering the vertical and horizontal distances between the watermark and the left, right, center, top, or bottom of the page.

Update a watermark

  1. Choose Document > Watermark > Update.
  2. Make changes to the watermark, and then click OK.
Important: If you have multiple watermarks in a PDF, this procedure will update only the first watermark you added and will discard all other watermarks. If you change your mind about updating the watermarks after you have completed this process, immediately choose Edit > Undo Watermark.

Remove watermarks

 Do one of the following:

  • To remove all watermarks from all pages, choose Document > Watermark > Remove, and click OK to confirm the removal.

  • To remove a watermark from all pages immediately after adding it, choose Edit > Undo Watermark.