Lately several customers have been reporting that the competitor’s WooCommerce PDF Watermark plugin is broken, and they’re relieved to have found us. It’s a shame it broke for whatever reason, and we are glad to have you here!
Today I took a look at the Woo PDF Watermark feature request list, and it gets me wondering: why people pay more for less plugin?
Set per document password
PDF Ink has always allowed users to set unique watermarking properties for individual WooCommerce products. Even more, it allows users to set watermarking properties for variations of products. So each PDF can have a different password. Each PDF can have a different watermark. Each PDF can have different everything.
Watermark specific PDF pages and exclude others
WooCommerce PDF Watermark allows for watermarking on “all pages,” “first,” “last,” or alternate pages. Hey! We’ve got you matched, nothing special to see here.
But… we are working on major improvements to all our PDF manipulation plugins, and soon you’ll be able to select any pages to watermark. Meanwhile, you can use filter hooks included in our plugins to avoid watermarking or passwording any particular PDF page. If you need advice on that, get in touch!
Image and text watermarks in the same document
This feature has been “coming soon” on the WooCommerce website for years. It is still there in 2025, three years after this blog post was first written. This is something we coded in the first round of WaterWoo, eight years ago. PDF Ink also includes this feature.
You want two images and text? You can have it. Want three? Sure. What makes this possible is PDF Ink uses a different PDF parser/writer than WooCommerce’s plugin, and that parser reads HTML. So, put HTML in your watermark, such as an tag, and voila! Do you want transparency of your text? We have that here, and are the only WordPress PDF watermarking plugin with that (just use the {OPAC} opacity shortcode).
Allow watermarks to work on layered PDFs
Face it, you’ll never have this feature with an open source PDF parsing plugin. That’s the truth, and it’s because of licensing issues. This feature is never coming to WooCommerce PDF Watermark, and we cannot fathom why they would suggest such a thing
You need PDF Ink and SetaPDF Stamper (a paid 3rd party library) to get this going, but you CAN get it going. For a little more moolah, you’ve got your custom watermark and or your password and protections on a layered PDF. Bingo!
Learn more about how to take best care of your PDFs when watermarking and passwording them via WordPress.
Selectable link stripping
This is another feature that has been coming soon on the WooCommerce website for a very long time. If Woo is referring to PDF internal links, it’s a false promise, this feature is never coming. That’s because the PDF libraries available to ship with GNU licensed WordPress plugins do not parse internal links (Table of Contents) into memory, and won’t because of how they are written in the PDF stream. Besides, this is just odd. Who wants links, or anything, stripped from their PDFs? If you own a PDF, why not just strip it yourself before sharing it?
If you are tired of WordPress PDF plugins stripping your PDF links, use a plugin that works alongside SetaPDF Stamper (such as PDF Ink)!
The Elephant in the Room
“Unable to serve the file at this time. The file does not support watermarking.”
Does that sound familiar? WooCommerce’s plugin (from woocommerce.com) does not support newer PDFs! If you want to upload a PDF for manipulation with their plugin, it has to be old (version 1.4 and older!). To give you an idea of how bonkers this is, PDF version 1.5 came out in 2003. That was twenty years ago!
PDF Ink supports all versions of PDF. If you want to mark layered PDFs, just use our purchase SetaPDF Stamper to run alongside PDF Ink.
The cheapest way to solve this problem is to switch to PDF Ink You’ll enjoy a ton more flexibility with watermarking, and many more features. But if you are determined to fix WooCommerce PDF Watermark to accept ALL versions of PDF, here is what you do:
- Purchase FPDI PDF-Parser from Setasign
- Install it in this folder (which will unfortunately need to be done again next time your upgrade WooCommerce PDF Watermark) : yourwebsite.com/wp-content/plugins/woocommerce-pdf-watermark/includes/lib You want to make sure yourwebsite.com/wp-content/plugins/woocommerce-pdf-watermark/includes/lib/FPDI_PDF-Parser-2.0.6/src/autoload.php will be found on your server.
- Open the file yourwebsite.com/wp-content/plugins/woocommerce-pdf-watermark/includes/class-wc-pdf-watermarker.php I KNOW THIS IS TEDIOUS but you’re almost done
- On lines 46/47 where it says
//Include FPDI Parser to make it work with 1.4+ //require_once 'lib/FPDI_PDF-Parser-2.0.6/src/autoload.php';make it say instead://Include FPDI Parser to make it work with 1.4+ require_once 'lib/FPDI_PDF-Parser-2.0.6/src/autoload.php';The // (code comment) is removed from the second line. Now the plugin will seek that file and use the paid FPDI parser instead of the free (open source) version, which only reads PDFs to version 1.4. Also, the wizards truly behind all this magic (Setasign) get paid. Heck, if I’ve helped you, like really helped, PayPal $2 my way to let me know.
Thanks and good luck!
Coming soon: unicorns and wizards!
(More likely: cactus thorns and lizards)
Ultimately I know why people pay more and choose the WC branded plugin, and that is because WooCommerce has better exposure for their plugins on the market. This year was hard for us because WooCommerce used WordPress.org (their parent company) to force us to change our plugin names in the repository, which impacted users’ ability to find us. Funny enough they did not come after us OFF the Repository. Their trademark is strong, yet still they took advantage of strong “daddy” WP to force us off using three letters: “Woo.”
We are recovering slowly. Keep an eye out. All our existing plugin users are going to get a big upgrade (hint: not unicorns and wizards, but still pretty cool). Update 2025: that upgrade is PDF Ink!