How do I change the watermark colour in LibreOffice PDF exports?

Question

I'm an avid LibreOffice user, and sometimes I use it to generate sensitive PDFs (meaning, for preview purposes; I'm a writer). Recently I tried the watermark feature for PDF exports, but it's an ugly green colour that makes reading very difficult.

Is there a way to change the colour of the watermark?

Answer 1

Yes but it's something of a hack.

First, create a graphic in the package of your choice (Inkscape is a favourite of mine) for your watermark. This would be the word 'draft' for example. Make the page size of the graphic the same size and shape as the pages you're writing on in Libre Office and save it as a png. You can make it any shade or colour you like.

You can apply a background to any page by selecting Format>Page>Background and selecting graphic instead of colour. Set the background to take up the whole page area then browse to your png file.

You can create page styles that include any number of watermarks selecting the styles and formatting menu (F11) and going to page styles. Create a new page style and add your background using the process from the paragraph above. Save your new page style and you can apply it to any page you like. There's a screencast of this process on YouTube.

Answer 2

I don't think that any of the answers currently address this question. This question is referring to the new options to export a pdf with a watermark.

File --> Export as PDF

Under the 'General' tab, see 'Watermark' section.

Check the box 'Sign with Watermark' and enter watermark text.

Text appears in the pdf in bright green.

Its not currently possible to change this value as its hard-coded into a patch which changed the colour from bright red. This means that you'd have to change the value in the source code to do anything. The change was made to make the document more readable, and because the colour is in-line with the LO colours. The discussion on the LO maillist is available here: http://nabble.documentfoundation.org/PATCH-Change-of-the-color-of-the-watermark-at-the-pdfexport-td2127124.html

There is some talk there of addressing the issue, but i don't think anything has been done yet.

Answer 3

If you are referring to the color only watermark, You can change that color by

• Going to the "Format" menu --> then Selecting "Page" --> then selecting "Background" tab. There you can change the color of watermark.