MacMost Now 659: Creating Watermarks In iWork Pages

Sometimes you need to place a watermark, like the word DRAFT or CONFIDENTIAL, behind text in a document. You can do this using text boxes that are made into background items and then set them to appear across all pages in the document.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost Now. In today's episode, let's look at how to add a watermark behind your Pages documents. So let's say you want to put some text or a graphic behind your Pages document, say something that says "DRAFT" or "CONFIDENTIAL". It's a pretty common need - let's take a look at how to do it. Okay, so here I am in Pages and I've got some sample text in place. Now, I want to add the big word "DRAFT" behind all this text, so let me start by creating a text box here and entering the word "DRAFT" into it. And I'm going to make it a pretty large box here - you can see it's pushing all of the text behind it out of the way. We're going to take care of that in a second. I'm going to change the font size to something pretty big like that. I'm also going to change the color to, say, a light gray such as that, and now I'm going to bring up the Inspector here and with the Inspector, I'm going to choose how everything wraps around this box. I'm going to make it a background element. You can see now it falls into the background very nicely. It's not going to cause anything to wrap. I'm also going to make sure background objects are selectable so I can select this background element and manipulate it. If we change the view the view here and go to 50%, I can see the entire page. Let's select this background element, let's do something, let's center it. We use that to center it. We also want to rotate it some so I'm going to go over here to Metrics. I'm going to rotate it 45 degrees and create a nice angle like that. Now I'm going to put it in the position I want, and then go into Options and drag it to get another copy of it. This copy I'm also going to have to go into the wrapping and switch it to background, but the result is I've got two copies now there in the background so that kind of covers the entire document. But the problem I've got here is that these items are only on the first page. You can see they're not on the other page. I want it to be across the entire document so I'm going to select the first one, hold the Shift key down and select the second one, and then I'm going to go to Format, Advanced, and Move Objects to Section Master. And now you can see that it repeats for the entire section. There's only one section in this entire document, so it's there for every one. I can add more pages to it and that will be under it. The same will be true if I would put an image there and make that there a background image or anything else I want to put back there. So you can use this for all sorts of things - you can put "DRAFT", you can say "CONFIDENTIAL", you can put some other identifying information back there, you can put some sort of image back there and make it kind of a subtle image. You can put something that doesn't fill the entire document but simply is in the corner of it and repeats that the entire thing. So I hope you found this useful. Till next time, this is Gary with MacMost Now.

Comments: 8 Responses to “MacMost Now 659: Creating Watermarks In iWork Pages”

Riley

13 years ago

Gary,

How does one create watermarks in Keynote?

Gary Rosenzweig

You could just do the same thing -- place a large piece of text behind everything else. Just do it to the master slides instead of each individual slide.

Gary Stone

Thank you Gary, I often write up drafts for my job. By learning how to mark a Pages document as a draft, others can tell it is not the final version.
Thank-you.

Simon David Allen

Thanks for this - very useful.

David

I'm having a problem with this. I am making a menu for Spanish Class and want to make it look like its old used paper, but it does not let me make it a watermark.

That wouldn't be a watermark, but just a background. You'd need to find a full-page graphic of "old used paper" and put that in a box and place that behind everything else.

Nik A Hafiz

On the last part, you showed the way to inserting watermark on every page using the command

Format : Advance : Move Object to Section Master.

That was shown in a situation where you have 1-section document.

Kindly advise on the easiest way to inserting same watermark at same position on all pages if they contain multiple sections.

KRgds.

Off the top of my head, not sure. Play around with it and report back if you find a solution.

Comments Closed.

MacMost Now 659: Creating Watermarks In iWork Pages

Comments: 8 Responses to “MacMost Now 659: Creating Watermarks In iWork Pages”

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