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I am drawing a watermark with tikz underneath the footer, the watermark is basically a single node with text. Is there an option to make this text unselectable in the final pdf? The letters are very large and essentially decorative, and at the moment the cursor can still highlight and select the text, which is a behaviour I would like to avoid if possible.

This is the tikz code, FWIW.

%Page Number on Right Hand Side
\newcommand\transparentNumberRHS{%
    \noindent
    \tikzset{external/export next=false}
    \begin{tikzpicture}[remember picture, overlay]
        \node[inner sep=0,outer sep=0,opacity=0.05,scale=15,anchor=south east] at (1.75in,-1.8in) {\HUGE\thepage};
    \end{tikzpicture}%
}

Here is a complete set of code to reproduce the problem:

\documentclass[10pt]{memoir}
\usepackage{graphicx,tikz}
\chapterstyle{ell}                          %Default Chapter Style
\copypagestyle{chapter}{plain}     %The page style for chapters

%Chapter Page Number on Right Hand Side
\newcommand\transparentNumberRHS{%
    \noindent%
    \begin{tikzpicture}[remember picture, overlay]%
        \node[inner sep=0,outer sep=0,opacity=0.05,scale=15,anchor=south east] at (1.75in,-1.8in) {\HUGE\thepage};%
    \end{tikzpicture}%
}%
\makeoddfoot{chapter}{}{}{\transparentNumberRHS}%

\begin{document}
    \chapter{Chapter 1}
\end{document}

Which produces the following. I have highlighted how the text can be selected. Actually it is selected in preference to the main body text if the page contains actual content, which introduces a practicality issue for the reader.

Example

Nicholas Hamilton
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    I don't know if there is a more practical version, but one (admittedly complicated) would be to export only your watermark, convert it into an image format, thereby converting the text in a path (preferably saleable) and import it again in your tikz picture. – Timm Mar 11 '17 at 12:41
  • No that wont work. The watermark is unique to every page. – Nicholas Hamilton Mar 11 '17 at 12:41
  • Maybe you can work with the pgf library described here, which draws the letters. However, I'm not at all familiar with this, it seems unstable and your TeX might run out of memory or stack or ... - as far as I did understand so far. – Timm Mar 11 '17 at 12:48
  • That might work, but I am hoping there is a simple flag for tikz that I am unaware of. – Nicholas Hamilton Mar 11 '17 at 12:50
  • package accsup works well often (not always) – percusse Mar 11 '17 at 12:55
  • Maybe related http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/18542 and http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/11307 -- but basically it's about the already mentioned accsup package. But you also could generate different pixel based watermarks (e. g. watermark_1.png, watermark_2.png and so on) and then include them uniquely on every page. See also one of my questions: http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/347121 – Dr. Manuel Kuehner Mar 12 '17 at 17:44
  • Nobody can try anything because we don't have a complete example. At least, nobody can try anything without having to set up the problem first. – cfr Mar 14 '17 at 00:12
  • @cfr Please see my updated question, containing a complete example, and a highlight of the problem. – Nicholas Hamilton Mar 23 '17 at 11:07
  • Did the answer of @Symbol 1 help? – Dr. Manuel Kuehner Apr 04 '17 at 00:29

1 Answers1

2

I have once done the following

  • Open the font in FontForge
  • Select the character
  • export the outline as SVG
  • copy the SVG in TikZ

Now the text is uncopyable because it is merely a drawing that looks like latin letters. (Unless the reader is has a very strong OCR mechanism.)

Symbol 1
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