Question : Watermark

We are using oracle report server to generate pdf reports...what we would like to do is have a large watermark across the front of it.  Does anyone know if this is possible.
Basically i would like to append the watermark code to the unencoded pdf file...but i dont know what the code is to add a watermark in pdf
thanks

Answer : Watermark

You cannot just add "code" to a PDF file. If you don't know what you are doing, you will corrupt your PDF file if you add anything to the file. The PDF format is pretty complex (the spec is about 1000 pages), this means you need to use software to modify PDF files. What type of software depends on your requirements. Do you want to add the watermark in e.g. a server process to modify files automatically, or a process where you e.g. load Acrobat and process the 10 or so documents that were created during the day.
How many files do you need to process, and how automatic do you want the process to be?
If you can live with some manual intervention, I would go with Adobe Acrobat (the full version). If you go for Professional, you can use it's batch sequence feature and add the watermark (even a transparent watermark) for e.g. all files in a specific directory.

If you want to do this on a server (or in a server-like process), you probaly cannot use Adobe Acrobat because of it's licensing restrictions (in most cases it cannot be used as a server). In this case, you can use either a stamping application, or create your own application with one of the many available PDF libraries. If you can program in Java, you can use the free iText library (http://www.lowagie.com/iText). If you are programming in VB.NET you can use the (also free) port of iText to VB.NET (http://www.ujihara.jp/iTextdotNET/en/), and if you are programming in C#, take a look at the (also free) iTextSharp (http://itextsharp.sourceforge.net/). There are other libraries, but again, it's important what your requirements are.