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Watermarks and other recurring patterns

You can use the watermarks feature to place recurring patterns of objects on all, or on selected pages of a PDFClerk document.

The watermarks feature is powerful, flexible and easy to use. It is useful for watermarks, headers, footers, or any other recurring pattern you can think of for placing an object onto multiple sheets.

WaterMarks panel

To add a watermark drag a graphic or a text file to the preview area on the right hand sind of the pane, or click the + button and select a document from the Open dialog. You can also click the + Name button to create a watermark whose name is used as the text to be rendered.

The preview area shows how the object will look on the page specified in the "Preview Page" field, or if the "Preview Page" specifies page 0 it shows the watermark object by itself. By default the watermark takes the name of the imported file, but you can change it to anything you find more useful. PDFClerk always works on an internal copy of the original file, so renaming or deleting the watermark will not affect the original.

The first box below the Name field controls on which pages the object will be placed: All Pages, Even Pages, Odd Pages, First Page, Last Page, Pages in List. If you selected Pages in List you need to enter the pages in the Page List field. If you selected all, even or odd pages you may wish to exclude the first and/or last page.

You can set rotation and opacity, overall placement and specify whether the object appears on front of the page, or behind the page. If you have multiple watermarks appearing on several pages, you can control the drawing order by putting objects in specific layers. The layers are independent for the "on top" and "behind" options.

In addition to the overall placement of objects, you can fine tune their position using the gutter options. If, for instance, you have chosen top-left placement, then you can easily fine tune the placement by adjusting the values for the top and left gutter.

There is flexible automatic control over the sizing of the objects, or manual control if appropriate. Objects can be tiled across the page, and when tiled, if a rotation is set, you can rotate the tiled objects as a whole, or each tiled object individually by toggling the state of the Rotation button (which appears only when tiling and rotating).

Activating the Sync To Source check box causes the document to track changes to the file that is used as the source of the watermark. If the source file changes the watermark is dynamically updated. When PDFClerk can no longer find the original source file (it got renamed or removed), then it stops syncing to the source file, preserving the current state of the watermark. To change the source of the watermark, or re-connect to the source file for syncing, after the source has been renamed, click the Set Source… button.

Name based watermarks support the following special variables:

These are dynamically replaced by their respective values in the document, both when displayed in the page list, and when rendered on the pages. (So the watermarks adjust automatically as you reorder pages and/or add/remove pages, or alter some document attributes.)

See also

Creating Recurring Patterns with "Watermarks"