Make repeating watermark with tiling

Question

I am trying to make two different types of watermarks:

1. One which takes multiple words and puts them at an angle to fill the page, and
2. A tile-able one which can take word(s) and/or images.

Both of these need to have the key aspects of a) filling the whole page (or nearly so), and b) having semi-transparent gray text (when text is included). This should be applicable to all pages (or a range), since the end goal is to make something that's difficult to remove the watermark from if copied somewhere else. I have not been able to find something that works as of yet. An example of the two are below:

For the first case, I'd like to be able to manually define where to make the "line" breaks. The second one should be able to include images with the text and tile those the same (e.g. if I replaced "2" with an image file). I know this should be possible, I just can't figure it out.

Answer 1

You used to be able to do it with the xwatermark package like so:

\usepackage[printwatermark]{xwatermark} % OBSOLETE, NO LONGER WORKING
\newwallpaper[allpages,color=black!12,tilexsize=0.14\paperwidth,tileysize=0.015\paperwidth,tilexoffset=1ex,tileyoffset=2ex]{Watermark}

but this no longer works since 2021 or so.

An alternative is to use the draftwatermark package and to fill a table using for loops (which is tricky in itself to make it work, see problem with using loop inside the tabular environment):

\documentclass[12pt,a4paper]{article}

\usepackage{pgffor}
\usepackage{draftwatermark}
\newcounter{it}
\DraftwatermarkOptions{
  scale=0.08,
  angle=45,
  text={\begin{tabular}{c}%
          \setcounter{it}{1}%
          \whiledo{\theit<100}{%
          \foreach \col in {0,...,15}{Watermark\ \ } \\%
          \stepcounter{it}%
          }
          \end{tabular}
          },
  color=black!12,
}

\usepackage{ifthen}
\usepackage{newtxtext,newtxmath}
\usepackage{xcolor}


\begin{document}
hello
\end{document}

Explanations: the \foreach loop repeats the text in a line, with some spacing (\ \ ), 15 times. You could change this into columns of the table, but it makes it more complicated. Unfortunately, adding another \foreach loop to create rows doesn't work. For this, instead we use a counter and a \whiledo loop to create 100 rows.

The number of iterations you need to fill the whole page will depend on the text of your watermark.

You can change the angle and the scale using the draftwatermark package options.

For some reason, it doesn't work well for me without selecting another font (newtxtext or fourier both seem to work)

Here is the result: