How to Add a CONFIDENTIAL or DRAFT Watermark to a PDF

Two of the most common things anyone stamps on a document are CONFIDENTIAL and DRAFT. They do quite different jobs, and they want different treatment.

DRAFT watermarks

A draft watermark exists to stop the wrong version being treated as final. The failure mode is specific and expensive: an unapproved draft gets forwarded, someone acts on it, and the mark was too subtle to notice.

So a draft watermark should be loud:

• Wording: DRAFT, or better, DRAFT — NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION. Adding a date or version helps: DRAFT v3 — 12 MAR.
• Opacity: 0.3–0.4. Impossible to overlook.
• Colour: red or orange. Convention does real work here.
• Placement: large, diagonal, centred across the page.
• Repeat: usually unnecessary — one large diagonal mark per page is plenty.

CONFIDENTIAL watermarks

A confidentiality watermark has a different job: the document usually still needs to be read properly, often by a client or a regulator, so legibility matters more. It is marking status, and creating a record that the recipient was told.

• Wording: CONFIDENTIAL, PRIVATE & CONFIDENTIAL, or INTERNAL USE ONLY. For legal or commercial material, naming the parties is stronger than a generic mark.
• Opacity: 0.15–0.25. It should be clearly present without fighting the text.
• Colour: mid-grey. Survives greyscale printing, stays unobtrusive.
• Placement: diagonal across the page, or a repeating tile if deterrence matters.
• Repeat: worth switching on — a tiled mark is much harder to crop out of a screenshot.

Step by step

1. Open the watermark tool and select your PDF.
2. Click Text Watermark and type your wording in capitals — capitals read as a stamp rather than as body text.
3. Drag it to the centre of the page and rotate it to roughly 45°.
4. Set the colour and drop the opacity to the range above.
5. For CONFIDENTIAL, tick Repeat and choose Diagonal.
6. Click Apply Watermarks and download.

What a watermark does and does not do

A watermark is a notice, not a lock. It tells anyone holding the document what its status is, and it makes casual forwarding conspicuous. It does not stop the file being opened, copied or emailed — anyone with the PDF can still read every word.

If you need to actually restrict access rather than label it, that is a password, not a watermark. See watermark or password: which do you need? The two are frequently used together.

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Related

• How to add a watermark to a PDF
• Watermarking multiple PDFs at once