How to add Background Watermark (Confidential, Draft) in LaTeX?

In this tutorial, you will learn how to add a Background Watermark (Text or Image) in a LaTeX document, including all customization options for watermark.

Here I will use the background package to add a watermark because this package give you a lot of options (color, opacity, angle, etc.) to modify the watermark as you want.

Add watermark for every page in LaTeX

To add “Draft” as a watermark for every page you have to load the package with \usepackage{background}. Take a look.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{background}
\usepackage{lipsum} % For dummy text 

\begin{document}

\lipsum[1-10]

\end{document}

Output:

Set your text as background watermark

In order to set your own text as a background watermark then you can use the \SetBgContents{<text>} option in the preamble. Replace the <text> with any text you want.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{background}
\SetBgContents{CodeSpeedy} % Set your text
\usepackage{lipsum} % For dummy text 

\begin{document}

\lipsum[1-10]

\end{document}

Output:

Set an image as background watermark

To add an image in LaTeX you have to the \includegraphics{<file>} command and load the graphicx package to set the height and width of the image.

Now you can put this command inside the \SetBgContents{} command to use that image as a watermark.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{background}
\SetBgContents{\includegraphics[width=0.15\textwidth]{CodeSpeedy-Logo.png}} % Set your image
\usepackage{lipsum} % For dummy text 

\begin{document}

\lipsum[1-10]

\end{document}

Output:

More customization on the watermark

The background package provides more options to customize the watermark. I listed all of these. Take a look.

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{background} 
\SetBgContents{Confidential}
\SetBgColor{red}
\SetBgScale{7.5}
\SetBgAngle{55}
\SetBgOpacity{0.6} % Set opacity of watermark (0 to 1)
\SetBgPosition{current page.center}
\usepackage{lipsum} % For dummy text 

\begin{document}

\lipsum[1-10]

\end{document}

Output:

Watermark only for the first page in LaTeX

If you want to get the watermark only for the first page then you have to use the [firstpage=true] option with the background package. Like this.

\usepackage[firstpage=true]{background}

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage[firstpage=true]{background} 
\SetBgContents{Confidential}
\SetBgColor{red}
\SetBgScale{7.5}
\SetBgAngle{55}
\SetBgOpacity{0.6} % Set opacity of watermark (0 to 1)
\SetBgPosition{current page.center}
\usepackage{lipsum} % For dummy text 

\begin{document}

\lipsum[1-10]

\end{document}

Output: