The most useful watermark: who it’s for
The ready-made stamps cover the usual cases: CONFIDENTIAL, COPY, DRAFT, SAMPLE and For KYC only. The last one is worth making a habit.
Every time you send a copy of an Aadhaar, PAN card, passport or bank statement to a bank, broker, landlord or employer, that copy can be saved, forwarded and reused. A plain copy works for anyone. A copy stamped with who it was for and why is much harder to pass off somewhere else. Type something like:
For XYZ Bank home loan KYC only, 22/10/2026
It fits easily: the box takes up to 80 characters. Keep it short enough to read at a glance, and include the date so an old copy can’t be reused next year.
Getting it to look right
- Strength runs from 10% to 60%, starting at 25%. The text is see-through, so the page underneath stays readable. Go lighter for documents someone has to read closely, like a statement, and stronger for a draft you don’t want mistaken for a final.
- Size is Small, Medium or Large. Medium suits A4. Long text on a small page reads better at Small.
- Direction is Diagonal, from corner to corner, or Straight across the middle. Diagonal is harder to crop out.
- Colour is Grey, Red or Violet. Grey is the quiet choice; red says “not the original” from across the room.
The preview shows the first page with the stamp exactly as it’ll be saved. Every page gets the same stamp, upright even on pages that are turned. You download a copy named like pan-card-watermarked.pdf.
What a watermark can and can’t do
A watermark is a deterrent, not a lock. It makes misuse obvious and awkward, which stops casual misuse. But it’s stored as text on top of the page, and someone determined, with a PDF editor, can remove it.
If you want it to be part of the page itself, run the watermarked file through PDF to JPG, then JPG to PDF. Each page becomes a single picture with the stamp in it. The text can’t be selected afterwards, which is the point.
To stop people opening the file at all, use Protect PDF to add a password. You can do both: watermark first, then protect.
Letters it can use
For now, watermarks take Latin letters only, as used in English and most European languages. Other characters, like Hindi or Tamil, would show as “?”. The page warns you as soon as you type one, before anything is saved.
Checked against the tool on 22 October 2026. How we write and test these guides