These forums are now Read Only. If you have an Acrobat question, ask questions and get help from one of our experts.

How to make a non removable watermark?

DENALI
Registered: Dec 7 2009
Posts: 8

I am trying to find a way to make a permanent watermark within a pdf that cannot be removed should someone be able to crack my password protection. Is there a way or a program that can accomplish this for me. Thanks for your time.

UVSAR
Expert
Registered: Oct 29 2008
Posts: 1357
If you want to keep the content as text, then no.

The only option would be to flatten each page into a single bitmap image, including the watermarks, so it becomes part of the same object.
try67
Expert
Registered: Oct 30 2008
Posts: 2398
A watermark in general can't be removed, but if you want to be sure you can flatten the pages.

- AcrobatUsers Community Expert - Contact me personally at try6767 [at] gmail [dot] com
Check out my custom-made scripts website: http://try67.blogspot.com

DENALI
Registered: Dec 7 2009
Posts: 8
Could you tell me how to flatten a pdf to accomplish this? Can you do it to all pages in the pdf at once or better yet run a batch process to do several pdf's? Thanks
try67
Expert
Registered: Oct 30 2008
Posts: 2398
If you want to do it in a batch, set the batch action to Execute a JavaScript and enter this code into it:

this.flattenPages();

BE AWARE: Once you do this all form fields, annotations, etc. become flattened and can't be edited any more.

- AcrobatUsers Community Expert - Contact me personally at try6767 [at] gmail [dot] com
Check out my custom-made scripts website: http://try67.blogspot.com

DENALI
Registered: Dec 7 2009
Posts: 8
Hello Again
I figured out how to flatten the pdf however it still wont flatten it making the watermark permanent. After adding a watermark and flattening i can still use the remove watermark function and it will remove the watermark from the document after flattening. Same goes for doing the above but with background instead of a watermark. Any other ideas? Thanks

EDIT, i am using acrobat 8 professional
UVSAR
Expert
Registered: Oct 29 2008
Posts: 1357
As I said, you can't flatten the watermark into the page content in a way that makes it permanent unless you convert the pages to images. Even if you flatten the OCG layer into the content, anyone with Acrobat Pro can remove it again. That's what the object tools are for.

Depending on your page content, rasterising it will make the PDF massive, you'll lose the ability to zoom in, and of course it kills any hope of accessibility, search engine indexing, reflow and text searching - but it makes the page completely uneditable.

File..Export..Image.. (choose something lossless such as PNG)
This saves each page image into a folder, postfixed with the page number.

Close the original PDF, then combine the images into a new PDF file.
Merlin
Acrobat 9ExpertTeam
Registered: Mar 1 2006
Posts: 766
DENALI wrote:
Could you tell me how to flatten a pdf to accomplish this?
You can download and use this free tool : http://abracadabrapdf.net/articles.php?lng=en&pg=15;-)
gkaiseril
Expert
Registered: Feb 23 2006
Posts: 4307
The first place I would look at is the authoring program to create the watermark before creation. One can make fields look like a watermark and then flatten the PDF after adding the fields and setting their values.

George Kaiser