How do I add borders/watermarks to PrintDraft?

Question

(Malachi James writes)

According to this page adding the line \def\PageBorder{mywatermark.pdf} should add a pdf to our PrintDraft file as a watermark. I have tried adding this line to ‘PrintDraft-mods.tex’ but when I do that PrintDraft fails after creating about 2 pages and the resulting pdf is corrupted. And yes, I do have a pdf in the directory which should be being used as a watermark.

Answer 1

(Malachi James answers)

I’ll answer my own question for the benefit of others searching for the same issue:

You can indeed add a border to PrintDraft by adding

\def\PageBorder{mywatermark.pdf}

to PrintDraft-mods.tex. Furthermore, you should be able to manipulate your pdf using the same options that can be passed to \XeTeXpdffile

Along with the example here:

\def\PageBorder{mywatermark.pdf scaled 2000 rotated 45}

you should also be able to use xscaled, yscaled, width and height (untested).

The issue I had was caused by my pdf being version 1.5 while PrintDraft will only deal with pdfs up to version 1.4. I was able to adjust the options in my pdf print driver and create a usable pdf for my border.

If your border is a picture file you can also use it, but it takes slightly more work. You must find the ptx-cropmarks.tex file in your Paratext installation folder and edit the line

\global\setbox\b@rder=\hbox{\XeTeXpdffile \PageBorder \relax}%

to read

\global\setbox\b@rder=\hbox{\XeTeXpicfile \PageBorder \relax}%

Which picture formats you can use is determined by your operating system.