Addendum to 12th installment: watermarks with copyright notice using LaTeX

So, it's been awhile. And there's been plenty I could have blogged about on the tech front. Like when I copied my Arch install to another hard drive, making it bootable. But I didn't. And now I've forgotten important details of how I did it. Oh well.

I can blog about this next item, though, which is still fresh in memory. I've got to write up  some articles and am sending them out for proofreading. So I wanted to mark them as drafts, something I already know how to do and have blogged about previously.

I decided to modify things a bit for the current task, though. This time I'm using only one utility to do the watermarking--LaTeX--and I'm tweaking things a bit further.

The challenge this time is making a watermark with a line break, as well as one that contains text with differing font sizes in the two lines. I want a really large font for the first line, which marks the document as a draft--as in my previous installment--but I want a really small font for the second line this time. That second line is where a copyright notice will be located.

Without further ado, here's the MWE (TeX-speak for minimum working example) I've come up with for accomplishing this:

\documentclass{article} \usepackage{fullpage} \usepackage[margin=1.0in]{geometry} \usepackage{hyperref} \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} \usepackage[english]{babel} \usepackage{graphicx} \usepackage{type1cm} \usepackage{eso-pic} \usepackage{color} \makeatletter \newcommand{\the\year} \makeatother \SetWatermarkText{\rotatebox{15}{\parbox{16cm}{% DRAFT \\ \small{\textbf{Unless otherwise attributed, content of this document \textcopyright Yours Truly, \the\year}}}} }} \SetWatermarkScale{1.4} \SetWatermarkColor[gray]{0.90}% \title{Lorem ipsum} \begin{document} \maketitle Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis aute irure dolor in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse cillum dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident, sunt in culpa qui officia deserunt mollit anim id est laborum. \end{document} }

This will place, diagonally across each page of the document, a notice in light gray font and in very large letters, with the word DRAFT. Underneath that, there will be text in much smaller font alerting that the material is under copyright claim of the document's author. It's also got a nice little feature that auto-inserts the year, so it's something that can be reused in varying documents over a period of time, relieving the composer of having to fiddle with minor details like dates.

So, that's about it for this installment!

LATE ADDITION: Just today I ran across a new means of watermarking that can be done on already-existing .pdf files. It involves using the program pdftk and is quite simple. You simply create an empty--except for your desired watermark--.pdf, then use the program to add the watermark to the already-existing .pdf. Something like the following:

pdftk in.pdf background back.pdf output out.pdf

(I ran across that here). I used LibreOffice Draw to create such a background watermark and easily added that to an existing .pdf. It worked great, though it should be noted that the watermark won't cover graphics; I assume there must be a way to make it do so, however.