Adding a Watermark To Pages Documents

If you wish to put a watermark, like a 'Draft Copy' or 'Classified' label on your Pages document before printing or distributing a PDF, you can do it easily using Section Masters. You can place anything back there, such as text, shapes, or images. In this example, we'll place some diagonal text across the background and it will appear on all pages.


Video Transcript CLICK TO EXPAND
Let's look at how to create a watermark in Pages. So a watermark is something that marks the page. It doesn't get in the way of the text but clearly marks it as something like, maybe, classified or a draft or something like that. So as an example here we've got a regular Pages document. So this is not a page layout document. This is one where the text flows from one page to the next and I have some sample text in there. You want to watermark it so that when you print it out or create a PDF it's clear that this is not the finished document. We're going to use Draft Copy as an example watermark.

So, we can start off by creating a text box that's going to have text in it. So I'll create a new text box here. You can see that the text box inserts itself in the middle of the page. It pushes all the text out of the way. We're not going to worry about all of that for now. For now let's just get the words Draft Copy in there. So I'm going to do it in all capital letters DRAFT COPY. I'm going to enlarge that a bit. So let's go to like 70 points and then let me click on the box here and enlarge the box so that it fits across. Center it and, you know, for good measure let's make this a kind of grey color here rather than having it something that will make it harder to read the text.

Now I could go and make this so that it doesn't cause the text to wrap. If I were to do that then you would actually have this and the text in the same spot. It would be a watermark. It would work except that it would only be in this one place in our document. It wouldn't be on the other pages. So what we want to do is we want to move this to the Section Master.

So we go to Arrange Section Masters and move object to Section Master and watch what happens. First, the text now flows over it because there are different layers. There are two layers in a Pages word processing document. There's the Section Master and there is the regular page text. Now we have this behind that. We have it there and this does a couple things. It makes it so the text now doesn't wrap around it. It kind of ignores that text box. Also, it's on every page of this section. There it is. DRAFT COPY. So that's great!

Now let's continue to adjust it. I'm going to go back to Arrange Section Masters and say Make Master Objects Selectable. This is how we edit Master Objects. I can now click and select this text again whereas before I couldn't select it at all. It was like it was permanent. So I'm going to go and click on Arrange here and give it a little bit of an angle, thirty degrees. That looks really good there. I like how that works.

Now I want to have more than one copy here. Let's change the zoom to 50%. I'm going to Copy and then I'm going to Paste. Look what's going to happen. When I Paste notice it pastes on the main document, on the main layer. So I need to now move this back to the Section Master. So now I have two copies here. So I'm going to put this one here. Now I have Draft Copy and Draft Copy. You can see I've got that for every page. I've got two of them. Now I can go to Arrange Section Masters and turn that off. Now this doesn't get in the way anymore. It's just there.

Now when I print or create a PDF that grey draft copy text is going to be behind my regular text and everything else on the page and it all looks good. So I can go File, Print and you can see it's there on that. I can create a PDF of it and you can see it there. The same thing will happen when I print it. When it's time for me to remove it I can just go to Arrange Section Masters. Make them selectable. Select both of these. Delete it or change it to something else whatever I want to do and I've got the document back to normal.

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