March 12, 2025 Updated: August 15, 2025
A case study showing how to get a customer's WooCommerce order information printed on their PDF during download, to discourage file sharing & theft. In this case, we have a sheet music distributor who wishes to stamp the purchasing choir name on each page.
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November 13, 2023 Updated: August 15, 2025
Here is some PHP code for WordPress/WooCommerce which will make PDF Ink recognize TWO custom shortcodes in any watermark content: [VARIATION_DESC] and [VARIATION_NAME]. These translate to variation description and variation name, both aspects of a WooCommerce variable product. This code (everything above the dashed line) should get added anywhere in your functions.php file. If unsure where to put it, add it at the end of the file. You could also add the snippet using the WordPress plugin called “CODE SNIPPETS” (front and back end). This snippet development was sponsored by customer Michael. Thanks Michael! For reference (maybe for people migrating from WaterWoo to PDF Ink) here is a snippet which […]
October 27, 2023 Updated: August 16, 2025
The two best plugins available for WooCommerce PDF file download watermarking/passwording are WooCommerce PDF Watermark and PDF Ink (sold here). If you’re considering purchasing one or the other, this post will clearly show you which is the better choice — by far. Both plugins have been available for many years, both plugins perform the same essential tasks, and yet they are quite different under the hood. They offer different features, and at different price points. What’s under the hood: Both plugins use free, open-source PDF manipulation libraries to accomplish passwording and watermarking. WooCommerce’s offering uses FPDI to parse PDFs and FPDF to re-write them.As of October 2023, WooCommerce is using […]
April 17, 2023 Updated: August 15, 2025
A customer wrote with a neato request last month. If one WooCommerce product had several PDFs, and wasn’t a variable product, how could each PDF in the list be watermarked differently from the others? There is no setting for that inside PDF Ink because WooCommerce hasn’t exactly made that function easily possible, and also because it somehow hadn’t been requested until last month. That’s sort of amazing considering how long the plugin has been around! Anyway, it was a good request and so we added a filter hook called ‘pdfink_woo_filter_settings‘. (This hook replaces the ‘wwpdf_filter_settings_array’ in WaterWoo PDF Premium, with identical arguments.) Filtering Settings Because WooCommerce — unlike Easy Digital […]
February 15, 2021 Updated: August 15, 2025
There are quite a few built in shortcodes, but sometimes we just need something… special. You can add your own shortcodes to PDF Ink for on-the-fly customized watermarks on PDF pages. In this simple example we are going to create a shortcode to reflect a customer’s order total (price) in the watermark, when using a custom shortcode: [TOTAL_PRICE] Now when you use [TOTAL_PRICE] in your watermark, the PDF will show the total price of the WooCommerce order the PDF was purchased in. Perhaps this way you could print out the price on a gift certificate. More on how to create gift certificates using PDF Ink can be found here. Another […]
July 7, 2020 Updated: August 15, 2025
A few emails came in recently asking about how to let customers know their PDFs are password-protected. We definitely want to avoid any confusion or frustration caused by customers receiving passworded PDFs and not knowing what their password is. When it comes to sharing passwords, especially for PDF files, clear communication is essential. Website administrators often share passwords automatically with users and customers, but this can lead to confusion if the password is not clearly and repeatedly communicated. If the message is sent once, it is highly likely the customer will miss it. Who reads anymore these days, right? (It’s amazing you’re even reading this!) One person in particular wanted […]
June 1, 2020 Updated: August 15, 2025
If you would like to create a custom magic tag to display dynamic output, that can usually be done using filter hooks included in PDF Ink. The filter hook to use is ‘pdfink_filter_placement_content’ and the parameters it passes are $content, $key, $order_id and $product_id. $key refers to the placement: 0 is the first placement, 1 is the second, and if you have more, they’d be numbered 2, 3, 4 etc. PSST! The ‘pdfink_filter_placement_content‘ hook also works for Easy Digital Downloads and Download Monitor, with nearly identical parameters. Keep reading! Unless you are adding static content (such as the hour), or global data (such as the $_SERVER[‘REMOTE_ADDR’]), it’s necessary that you […]
October 6, 2018 Updated: August 15, 2025
Here is an example of adding new magic tags to PDF Ink for on-the-fly and totally-customized watermarks. A Brazilian customer using WooCommerce requested a magic tag to display the Cadastro de Pessoas Físicas (CPF) on PDFs. CPF is a taxpayer identification number all citizens of Brazil must use to shop online within Brasil. In order to collect CPF data from customers, our customer uses the Woocommerce Extra Checkout Fields for Brazil plugin.* We wrote the following code to programmatically create the magic tag [BILLING_CPF]. This magic tag will import any customer’s CPF number into their personalized PDF during stamping (when the customer clicks download). The “WooCommerce Extra Checkout” plugin mentioned […]
