RunLocalTools

PDF Watermark Tool — Add Text or Logo Watermarks Free, No Upload

Watermark PDFs online for free — text or logo, single or tiled, any angle, above or behind your content. Preview on your real pages first. Runs entirely in your browser.

What it does

This tool stamps a text or image watermark onto your PDF pages — CONFIDENTIAL, DRAFT, your company logo, whatever you need. You control the size, colour, opacity, angle, and whether it appears once or tiled across the whole page. Pick which pages get marked, and choose whether the mark sits above your content or behind it. Watermark one PDF or a whole batch at once, then download. Nothing is uploaded anywhere — the PDF never leaves your device.

How it works

The standard watermark mode edits your PDF’s existing pages directly, so your original text stays selectable, links keep working, and the file size barely changes. It draws with the same 12 standard fonts every PDF viewer already has built in, so there’s nothing extra to download for plain English text. If your watermark uses a script those fonts can’t cover — Cyrillic, CJK, Arabic, emoji — the tool automatically switches that watermark to a small embedded image instead, and tells you it did.

For rotated or cropped pages, the tool reads the page’s actual visible area and orientation before placing anything, so a watermark lands the right way up and in the right spot even on a landscape page inside a portrait file.

There’s also a permanent mode for when “can’t be lifted off” matters more than a small file size: it renders each marked page as an image with the watermark baked in, at a resolution and JPEG quality you choose, then rebuilds those pages inside the PDF. Pages you didn’t mark are left completely alone, keeping their original text.

How to use it

  1. Drop in one or more PDFs.
  2. Choose text or an image/logo, then set its look — font, colour, size, opacity, and angle. A one-click preset list covers CONFIDENTIAL, DRAFT, SAMPLE, and more.
  3. Pick single placement (with a 9-point position grid, or auto-fit) or a tiled, repeating pattern.
  4. Choose which pages to mark — all, odd, even, first, last, or a custom range like 1-3, 7, 10-.
  5. Check the live preview against your real page before committing.
  6. Pick standard or permanent output, then watermark and download. Several files download together as a zip.

FAQ

Will this work on a scanned PDF that’s really just an image?

Yes — since the watermark is drawn as a new layer or a new rendered page rather than relying on the PDF having real text, it works the same way on scanned pages.

Can I watermark just page 1, or every page except the first?

Yes. The page selector has one-click options for the first page only or all-except-the-first, plus a custom range field for anything more specific.

Does it work with non-English text or emoji?

Yes. If your watermark text needs characters outside the standard PDF fonts, the tool renders it as a crisp image automatically — you don’t need to do anything differently.

Can someone remove the watermark afterward?

In standard mode, a determined person with PDF-editing software could remove it, the same as with most watermarking tools. Permanent mode rasterises the marked pages into flattened images, so there’s no separate watermark layer to peel off — though this does mean those pages lose selectable text.

Will this work on a password-protected PDF?

No — an encrypted PDF is skipped and flagged rather than silently failing, so you’ll always know if a file in your batch didn’t get watermarked.

Does it change my file’s other pages or metadata?

Standard mode only touches the pages you select — everything else, including your original PDF’s structure, stays untouched.

Privacy

Your PDF is processed entirely in your browser using JavaScript — it’s never uploaded to a server. If you close the tab, your files disappear, unless you’ve left them saved in this browser for next time (with a one-click way to clear them).