Comment by jwrallie

Comment by jwrallie 4 hours ago

2 replies

I learned that a long time ago when I was a student and wanted to submit a pdf generated by a trial version of some software as an assignment and was trying to be clever and cover the watermark that said unregistered with a white box.

When opening the file in my slow computer, I could see all the rendering of the watermark happening in slow motion until the white box would pop up on top of the text.

barrkel an hour ago

When I was a student, and using a shareware or trial version of some software and wanted some printed output from it without a watermark, I printed to postscript (chose a printer that supported postscript and the driver used it instead of rasterized images), but using a file instead of a printer.

I could then open up the postscript, delete the commands that rendered the watermark, save it, then I converted it to PDF so it would be easy to print.

tor825gl 4 hours ago

It's actually quite easy to open the pdf and see that there are several different elements per page to the document, eg the main text, an image, the footer, the title.

Randomly removing these by trial and error will usually quite easily allow you to find the watermark and nix it, with the advantage that even a sophisticated recipient will not be able to find out from the pdf file what the watermark was.