Watermark
Add a watermark to selected pages of inFile
. Have a look at some examples.
You can watermark inFile
exactly once. The watermark is centered on the page and using description
you can configure various aspects like rotation, scaling and opacity. For text based watermarks you can also configure font name, font size, fill color and render mode.
WARNINGA 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 [-v(erbose)|vv] [-pages pageSelection] [-upw userpw] [-opw ownerpw] description inFile [outFile]
NOTEIn the Adobe world a watermark is text or an image that appears either in front of or behind existing document content, like 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 content that appears in front of the existing page content - sitting on top of everything else on a pagewatermark
is any content that appears behind the existing page content - residing in the page background
where content may be text, an image or a PDF page.
Flags
flag | description | required |
---|---|---|
verbose | turn on logging | no |
vv | verbose logging | no |
pages | page selection | no |
upw | user password | no |
opw | owner password | no |
Arguments
name | description | required | default |
---|---|---|---|
description | configuration string | yes | |
inFile | PDF input file | yes | |
outFile | PDF output file | no | inFile_new.pdf |
Description
A configuration string to specify watermark parameters.
The first entry of the description configures the type. It is one of the following:
- text string (Use \n for a multiline watermark)
- image file name
- PDF file name followed by an optional page number
parameter description values default f fontname, a basefont Helvetica, Times-Roman, Courier Helvetica p fontsize in points in combination with absolute scaling only 24 s scale factor 0.0 < i <= 1.0 followed by optional abs
orrel
0.5 rel c color, 3 fill color intensities 0.0 <= r,g,b <= 1.0, eg. 1.0, 0.0 0.0 = red 0.5 0.5 0.5 = gray r rotation angle -180.0 <= i <= 180.0 0.0 d render along diagonal 1 .. lower left to upper right 1 2 .. upper left to lower right o opacity 0.0 <= i <= 1.0 1 m render mode 0 .. fill 0 1 .. stroke 2 .. fill & stroke
Only one of rotation and diagonal is allowed.
The following description parameters are for text based watermarks only:
- font name
- font size
- color
- render mode
Default description
'f:Helvetica, p:24, s:0.5 rel, c:0.5 0.5 0.5, r:0, d:1, o:1, m:0'
The default watermark configuration is:
- fixed center page position (free positioning will be part of a future release)
- scale factor
0.5 rel
ative 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
o
pacity1
In addition for text based watermarks:font name
Helvetica
- font size
24
points - fill color gray (
0.5 0.5 0.5
) - render mode fill (
m:0
)You only have to specify parameters that differ from the default.
Examples
Text Based Watermarks
Create a watermark using defaults only:
pdfcpu watermark 'This is a watermark' test.pdf out.pdf
Create a watermark using scale factor 1:
pdfcpu watermark 'This is a watermark, s:1' test.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 'This is a watermark, s:.9, d:2, c:.6 .2 .9' test.pdf out.pdf
Create a watermark with 0 degree rotation using scale factor 0.9 and render mode stroke
:
pdfcpu watermark 'This is a watermark, s:.9, r:0, m:1' test.pdf out.pdf
Create a watermark with a counterclockwise rotation of 45 degrees using scale factor 1, render mode fill & stroke
and a fill color:
pdfcpu watermark 'This is a watermark, s:1, r:45, m:2, c:.2 .7 .9' test.pdf out.pdf
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 'Draft, p:48, s:1, c:.8 .8 .4, o:.6' test.pdf out.pdf
Let’s assume we have a PDF where even pages are blank. We can add a watermark for theses pages saying “Intentionally left blank” like so:
pdfcpu watermark -pages even 'Intentionally left blank" test.pdf out.pdf
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 'pic.jpg' test.pdf out.pdf
Create a watermark using 0 degree rotation and relative scaling of 1.0:
pdfcpu watermark 'pic.jpg, s:1 rel, r:0' test.pdf out.pdf
Create a watermark using 0 degree rotation and absolute scaling of 1.0:
pdfcpu watermark 'pic.jpg, s:1 abs, r:0' test.pdf out.pdf
Create a watermark using a clockwise rotation of 30 degrees and absolute scaling of 1.0:
pdfcpu watermark 'pic.jpg, r:-30, s:1 abs' test.pdf out.pdf
Create a watermark using a clockwise rotation of 30 degrees and absolute scaling of 0.25:
pdfcpu watermark 'pic.jpg, r:-30, s:.25 abs' test.pdf out.pdf
PDF Based Watermarks
Create a watermark using defaults only. This will apply page 1 of some.pdf
:
pdfcpu watermark 'some.pdf' test.pdf out.pdf
This is how to create a watermark using defaults and page 2 of some.pdf
:
pdfcpu watermark 'some.pdf:2' test.pdf out.pdf