A watermark in presentation software and word processing is frequently used in a slightly different manner than digital watermarks used in other digital multimedia content. This watermark is often a faded image or text used as a background of a slide or a page. It is meant to enhance, but is not the focal point of the page/slide. Watermarks are sometimes used in the form of a logo, discreetly placed on a slide or page to brand the presentation or document.

How GroupDocs.Watermark Works?

GroupDocs.Watermark is an API for adding watermarks to the documents of different formats. It provides the effective watermarking methods that allow you to add watermarks that are hard to be automatically removed by third-party tools. It also allows you to search and remove previously added watermarks of popular types (including watermarks added by third-party tools) in a document. The API provides straight forward and easy to use set of methods to add, search and remove watermarks in supported file formats. It supports following watermark types.

• Text watermark
• Image watermark

Watermarking in Microsoft Word Documents

When adding watermark in Microsoft Word application, it places a shape with appropriate content in section headers. GroupDocs.Watermark API uses the same approach. When calling AddWatermark method of WordsDocument class, the shape is added to a document.

You can also set some additional options when adding shape watermark to a Word document using GroupDocs.Watermark.

The Following code sample demonstrates it.

The code snippet for java guys is given below:

You can see the faded red watermark in the center of the document page like the screenshot given below:

Let’s pick some other cases to see how effectively you can do watermarking in a Word Processing document.

Adding Watermark to a Particular Section

The Microsoft Word allows the user to divide and format the document into multiple sections. Defining sections in the document enables the user to set specific page layout and formatting for different parts of the document. An example of the sections is headers and footers. Headers and footers are used to display text or any graphical object on all the pages.

GroupDocs.Watermark API allows you to add watermark objects in the headers and footers of the page. Adding watermark to a section of a Word document using GroupDocs.Watermark consists of following steps.

1. Load the document 
2. Create and initialize watermark object 
3. Set watermark properties 
4. Add watermark to the section of the document
5. Save the document

Following code sample adds watermark to the headers of a particular section.

Java guys will write the code like below:

Locking Watermark in a Document

There might be the case when you need to lock the watermarks in a Word document to restrict the editing. To deal with such cases, the GroupDocs.Watermark provides 5 variants of locking Word document when adding watermark.

• AllowOnlyRevisions: user can only add revision marks to the document.
• AllowOnlyComments: user can only modify comments in the document.
• AllowOnlyFormFields: the document is split into one-page sections and locked section with watermark is added between each two adjacent document sections.
• ReadOnly: the entire document is read-only.
• ReadOnlyWithEditableContent: the document is read-only, but all the content except the watermark is marked as editable.

LockType property has been added to WordsShapeSettings class to set any of the above-mentioned lock types. WordsLockType enum in GroupDocs.Watermark.Office.Words namespace is used to define the lock type.

The following code sample shows how to add and lock the watermark in all pages.

Java guys can follow the code as given below:

Removing Watermark from a Particular Section

Removing watermark from a particular section of a Word document using GroupDocs.Watermark consists of following steps.

1. Load the document 
2. Create and initialize image/text search criteria  
3. Find possible watermarks
4. Remove found watermarks 
5. Save the document

Following code sample shows how to remove watermark from a particular section.

The code sample for Java users is given below:

The complete ready to run code sample is available on GitHub.