Watermark a PDF in your browser

How to watermark a PDF online without uploading it

Put a word such as Draft or Confidential, your name or your logo on every page of a PDF. The PDF watermark tool at the top of this page does it on your device. The file is not sent to a server.

Draft, confidential and other marks

A short word in capitals, turned at an angle and set to low opacity, reads as a stamp without hiding the page. Make the mark large enough to read across the page, and keep the opacity low so the text beneath stays legible. Tile mode repeats the mark across each page, which suits Confidential or Sample copy. A single mark in a corner suits a name or logo on a proposal or a portfolio.

If you still have the original Word, Excel or PowerPoint file, those programs have a built-in watermark option for drafts and confidential documents, as Microsoft's support pages describe, and so does Google Docs. Use whichever is closer to hand.

A watermark is a label, not a lock. It tells readers how to treat a document; it does not stop anyone from reading or copying it. For confidential files, use access controls or encryption as well. This is not legal advice.

Every page or a range

Type all to mark every page, a range such as 1-3, or a list such as 2,5-7. Pages are counted from 1, and both ends of a range are included. A range that runs backwards, such as 3-2, or that names a page the file does not have, is rejected with a message so you can fix it.

Page size, rotation and the mark itself

The mark is sized against each page as it is displayed, so a landscape page or a rotated scan gets the mark in the right place and the right way up. We draw your text as a picture before placing it, which means any font and any alphabet works. The trade-off is that the mark is not selectable or searchable text in the saved PDF. Opacity is applied once. A logo works the same way: its size is a percentage of the page width, so the same setting gives a mark in the same proportion on pages of different sizes.

Protected PDFs, size and what is kept

Some PDFs are protected. They are locked so that only certain people can open them, or they open freely but limit printing, copying or editing. We do not open protected PDFs, so we never work around the limits their owners set. The tool leaves such a file untouched and tells you so. To watermark one, first save an unprotected copy from the app that made it, such as Word, Pages or Google Docs, then add your watermark here. If the finished copy needs protection, add it last, in the app you use for that.

The copy keeps the document's information fields, such as title and author. We set the author only if you ask us to, using the creator in your copyright profile.

PDFs are processed one at a time, in memory. The cap is 200 MB per file on a computer. On a phone or tablet the page warns you above 50 MB, because those devices have less memory to spare. Loading many large PDFs at once has been reported to crash a browser tab, which is why we do not queue several in memory.