How to Stamp PDF Documents in 10 Easy Steps

Need to stamp a PDF with a ‘confidential’ stamp (or any other stamp?) for FREE?  Not only is this free but it’s freedom software as well.

You may have already read my tutorial about how to watermark and stamp documents using PDF chain.  This turned out to be an amazing tool for doing a bunch of PDFs and pages with the same confidential stamp in the same spot on the page.  For example, if you have a 50 page contract letter size, followed by a 20 page business plan letter size, this would be the best tutorial because you just click a few times and the software dumps the confidential stamp on all pages in seconds.  Then you open the next document and do it again.  However, it’s slightly cumbersome if you just need to do a page here and there, or a one off, or an unusual page size.  My toolkit I provided will let you do legal and letter with ‘confidential’ but you’re on your own for setting up anything else.

Okular has turned out to be a very amazing free and freedom piece of software.  Since anyone reading this is already using Ubuntu, the rest of the tutorial is easy.  Let’s start a tutorial on how to slap a confidential stamp on a simple one page PDF.

1. Go to the Ubuntu Software Centre

2. Search ‘Okular’ and click ‘install’

Note: seems you need the one with capital ‘O’.  Some extra packages may have slipped in there. See image:

3. Go to Launcher and launch Okular

4. Click ‘file’ and ‘open’ and then drill down to the PDF you want to muck up.

(if you need an image for this, just shut your computer off and cry yourself to sleep)

5. Click on ‘Settings’ and “Configure Okular”

6. Click ‘Annotations’, click Stamp, click ‘edit’ which will show you all the cool kinds of stamps you can slap on them there PDF

7. Choose your stamp.  There are just oodles of noodles here.

8. Click OK and get back to your PDF.

9. Push ‘F6’ on your keyboard which will bring up all your annotations (which are all very cool and useful by the way!)

10. Click the stamp icon (third from bottom) and start dragging and dropping your stamp wherever you like on the document and whatever size you would like.

Note: back in the settings you can mess around further with opacity, I believe and other things.  I bet there is probably a way to load your own stamp as well, which would be dope, but I’m way to busy to figure that out now.

Please reply with other useful things you found from this.