Watermark in the printed

I've noticed that this has been viewed many time but nobody has responded. I'm looking into implementing PDMWorks also and would like to know this. I'd even be interested to know if you can insert a watermark (workaround or true) into any drawing file that only shows when printed.

Anybody have any comments on this?

We're looking at this same situation to be able to stamp our SolidWorks drawings during a batch plot routine with the job number and date. Our printers don't have that capability built in... so what we're trying currently is using EDrawings to print the drawings, and utilizing an vb.net app to put a stamp on the drawing in a predetermined location.

Basically the program is going to:
1. Make an image that has the job number and date in it for this print run, and save it.
2. Open the drawing in EDrawings
3. Stamp the drawing with the image.
4. Print the drawing
5. Close the drawing without saving.

We're wanting a stamp, not a true watermark.. but you probably use the same method for a watermark if you could either:
1. For dynamic stamping (like current date or job) use a program to create an image that supports transparency, such as png or gif and put that image on the drawing with the same method I mentioned.
2. If your image stays the same, you could just create it as a gif or png and save it off in a safe location and just reuse the image each time.

I'm not sure what file formats EDrawings can accept for stamps.. so that'd be something to check into. And EDrawings can open many different types of files, and it's free, so it gives you some flexibility as far as users printing drawings that don't have SolidWorks.

We should be giving this a go hopefully sometime next week, and I'll post in here what we do if it works or doesn't work.

Just as an update to our progress with stamping drawings at print time... we're still working on the VB code to generate the image on the fly with our job number, but the stamping part is working just fine. Opening the files to print in EDrawings and then stamping them in a set location with the image is working beautifully. Right now we're doing it using a jpg image. So it's looking to be an effective way to watermark or stamp drawings.

Ok... we've managed this successfully.

The text is a bit blurry, but using VB.NET we're able to generate an image derived from text (job number and current date) and then using EDrawings, stamp that image into a specified location on the drawing.

We went into our solidworks drawings and added a little box on the drawing border to mark off the space that the stamp will be in to keep people from putting anything in it.

Like I mentioned before, if you were doing something like a logo or some kind of image that didn't change every time you print, your code will be A LOT simpler. The hardest part was figuring out how to make the image from the text string.

You should be able to write a quick little program to stamp and print a file using edrawings. I'm still playing around with ours, but it works.. I'm not happy with the image quality that vb creates, but for you, you wouldn't have to create the image dynamically, you could just save the image and reuse it, so you shouldn't have that problem.

I referenced here to get the code for stamping a drawing:
http://www.cad.vc/solidworks/w...me-edrawings-api-help

We had the same issue and opted to create a stamped PDF file (via an add-in).
Every time a drawing goes through a specific state change, the server generates a PDF with a specific watermark and puts it into the appropriate project folder.

Mike,

For some people that's really easy.. but that depends completely on your printer. I know for us, we have 2 regular printers that don't have that capability, a copy station that does, and a KIP that does.. but we also can print drawings directly down to the shop bays and they don't have that capability on any of their printers. For some companies that are smaller and are guaranteed to always print drawings on a printer that has that capability, that would work great.. but if you aren't 100% sure that your employees will always be printing on a printer that can watermark, I wouldn't suggest doing it that way.

Mike,

Yeah.. I understand that the employee doesn't have to check the watermark option every time... what I was saying was that for us, 2 of our office printers that are the primary printers for 90% of our drawings don't even have that as an option.. they can't do watermarking as a printer preference. And all of our printers down in the shop bays are the same model or older as those, and they don't have that option either.

We didn't want to have duplicates of all our drawings, so we're not saving out PDFs as we go.. so that's why we had to write a macro to watermark and print the drawings. And we're using edrawings as the print client so we don't have to have people with licenses of solidworks just to print drawings and because it's stamping feature made watermarking very easy to program.