How do you do watermarks or the like?

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midnightvisions

Hello,

I want to give a .pdf copy of book I wrote to a business for their use.  I would like to insert a water mark or some other kind of visible notation on the pages that "this copy is for their use only"

What is the best way of going about embedding this information?  I don't want to add that line to every page manually, that is the last resort.  I was looking for some kind of security setting, but I don't want the document password protected either.  I just want it stated on every page that this copy of my book is for their use only, and if it ever leaked out I would know where it came from.

Thanks in advance!

John_Jason_Jordan

Quote from: midnightvisions on May 03, 2011, 08:03:43 PMI want to give a .pdf copy of book I wrote to a business for their use.  I would like to insert a water mark or some other kind of visible notation on the pages that "this copy is for their use only"

Others may reply with other suggestions, but here is how I would do it.

First, open the master page (or one of them if you have more than one master page). Create a large text frame in the middle of the page. Set the font for the frame (with the Properties Palette) to a very large point size of a font that has a "black" version, preferably a sans serif font. Type your watermark or copyright information in the text box, center it and/or apply other tweaks so it looks the way you want it to appear on each page. Finally, set the color of the text to 10-20% black (or pick an appropriate gray color from the palette).

If you have more than one master page copy and paste the text frame onto all of them.

Your watermark will now appear on all your pages. If it is too dark for your text to be readable through it, go back to the master page(s) and change the font color to a lesser percentage of black.

If you want you can also rotate the text frame, say, about 15-20 degrees for an additional effect.
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midnightvisions

That's the same as manually editing every page.  My document is mixed graphics and text.  It would not work, and would screw up the master documents.  I have multiple master pages.

Is there a way of adding it when converting to .pdf form, or after when its already a .pdf?

Meho R.

Quote from: midnightvisions on May 04, 2011, 05:42:48 PM
That's the same as manually editing every page.  My document is mixed graphics and text.  It would not work, and would screw up the master documents. 
Why would it screw up the master documents? Just create another layer and put watermarks in it, so you don't have to touch anything already placed on master page(s). I'm not sure if there is a better way to do this in Scribus, so, if this isn't an option, you'll probably have to look for some external app which can add watermarks to PDFs. If you know how to use LaTeX, you can do this easily by using pdfpages to "include" created PDF document and using crop or watermark packages to add watermarks.


GarryP

I realise this is a late posting to this thread but it might be helpful to some readers.

If you're using a Mac, with OS X 10.6+ (or possibly earlier), you already have a tool to add watermarks to PDF documents. It's called "Automator" and it comes as a part of a standard OS X installation (in your Applications folder).

I won't go into how to use it here as there are plenty of tutorials on the web. Search for "osx automator watermark pdf" and you'll get lots of information.

Automator can also do plenty of other things that might come in useful to Scribus users, such as:

  • Combine PDF files,
  • Crop/scale/rotate images en masse,
  • Extract text from PDFs,
  • Render PDF pages as individual images,
and a whole load of other interesting stuff (create a podcast narration track from a text file, for instance).

I hope this is of some use to someone.