Category : Waterwoo

Updates & tips for Watermark PDF for WooCommerce (AKA “WaterWoo”), a PDF-watermarking and password plugin for Wordpress + Woocommerce. Learn more and purchase WaterWoo here.

Invisible Watermarks and Other Ways to Protect Your PDFs

PDFs are a fantastic way to share documents – they preserve formatting, are widely compatible, and can even be compressed for easy transmission. But what if that PDF contains sensitive or monetized information? The Portable Document Format (PDF) offers some security, which when stacked can be quite effective. These include: Watermarks. Adding content to a PDF, especially content customized to the end-user (such as their name and other personally-identifying information like phone/email, can not only personalize a PDF, but also thwart unauthorized sharing. Keep reading to find out how to make your watermarks most effective against PDF theft. Encryption. Arcfour RC4, and the superior 128-bit key or 256-bit AES encryption Passwording. User and owner passwords can be set. An owner password gives the holder full control over the PDF, including the ability to remove passwording entirely — share with caution! continue reading…

Where are the WordPress.org free plugins?

I’m getting too many emails about this to answer them all, sorry. Hopefully I can answer you here. I write and maintain WordPress plugins for a living. For ~8 years I have also provided and supported free plugins on the side. I provide two plugins in the free (open-source) WordPress.org plugin repository, both of which are well-loved and rated. As you may have noticed, they were abruptly removed by WordPress on January 24th. It was a surprise to me, too! Frankly I have been feeling burned out on supporting free software, so maybe this is a chance for me to at least say my piece. One has to think abstractly for it to feel rewarding, as in “I know people aren’t saying anything, but I imagine these plugins make the world better and peoples’ days easier.” I also feel like continue reading…

Creating your Own Watermarking Shortcodes for WooCommerce

You can add your own shortcodes to WaterWoo PDF Premium for on-the-fly customized watermarks. 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 shortcode: [TOTAL_PRICE] function fetch_woo_order_data_as_shortcode( $input, $order_id, $product_id ) { // first we need to get the order object from the order id // you can get a lot of info from the order object ( $order in this case) $order = wc_get_order( $order_id ); // now let’s get the order data from the order object $order_data = $order->get_data(); $order_total = $order_data[‘total’]; // BINGO! // there is a ton of other data you can get from the WC order object data, check out // https://stackoverflow.com/questions/39401393/how-to-get-woocommerce-order-details // and substitute in what you need into the code that follows below // if there isn’t a continue reading…

Printing a barcode or QR Code on a PDF

If you are or even if you are not using WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads but are still programming in PHP, I am available to consult on your TCPDF barcoding project to get it running. Get in touch!   The WaterWoo PDF Premium and EDDiMark PDF plugins can add barcodes and QR codes to PDFs dynamically upon download request via WooCommerce or Easy Digital Downloads. This is because both WordPress plugins use TCPDF to write PDF content, and TCPDF allows for barcode creation. Though this blog post might also be helpful for someone just trying to figure out how to write a barcode with TCPDF and PHP, these instructions are more geared toward a WordPress developer wishing to add 1D or 2D barcodes to existing PDF files. For WaterWoo, use the ‘wwpdf_add_barcode’ filter hook in the plugin (located in classes/wwpdf-watermark.php). continue reading…

PDF Watermarking Limitations, explained

Update March 2020: PDF Stamper (a separate plugin from Waterwoo PDF Premium) now allows PDF owners to keep their PDFs exactly as they are, but add a stamp. PDF Stamp is a drop-in plugin and requires users also purchase SetaPDF-Stamper software to install alongside it. Learn more here. WaterWoo is magic, but it does have its limitations. And one particular limitation has been disappointing customers, and frustrating us, for years. We'd like to explain. First of all, let's explain how WaterWoo works. In a nutshell, WaterWoo works by first reading a PDF into memory, then spitting it back out onto the page with watermarks rolled in. If the parser (FPDI or TCPDI) which reads the PDF does not read all the PDF, or cannot read certain PDF versions, then WaterWoo fails to deliver the expected. Ultimately, WaterWoo is built on continue reading…

TCPDF Performances

Make sure to test your watermarking thoroughly before going live! TCPDF is a fallible third-party library which does its best to parse/understand and re-write your PDF with your desired changes (watermarks/encryption/etc), but it cannot possibly work on all PDFs and on all servers 100% of the time. Stay realistic, think carefully through the process, plan, and do your testing. PHP Version You should be running at least PHP version 5.6 for the plugin to work, but higher that for it to work WELL. WordPress recommends you run PHP version 7.2 or higher. Our plugins are PHP version 8.3 compatible, so don’t hesitate to upgrade after making backups. PHP 7.0 is twice as fast for WordPress as PHP 5.6, and processes demands much more efficiently! Updating the PHP version on your server is the first thing you should try if you’re continue reading…