Watermarks in Pages

Placing a watermark on a Pages document as a section master object behind the body text will not stop any bad actor from copy/pasting the body text from your Pages document into another document, when sharing the Pages document. It will not be a theft deterrent for those inclined to that purpose.

When you export a Pages document with that watermark to a PDF, once again, one can copy/paste the text from the PDF into another word processing document because Pages PDF export does not set the Not Allowed Content Copying permission on the PDF. You can block PDF copying by visiting the Pages Print panel, click the PDF button, and select Save as PDF.

On the panel that appears when you click Save as PDF, there is a Security Options… button that leads to this screen:

where you can set a password to open the PDF, but also a permissions password that blocks content manipulation and printing. When these permission passwords are set, no one can copy/paste your PDF content elsewhere, thus safeguarding

your content from the bad actors. When a PDF so permitted is viewed in Adobe Acrobat Reader DC, the PDF properties now reflect:

and when I open the PDF in Apple's Preview and attempt to select, and copy the content to the clipboard, I get the following:

and similarly, any attempt to print, via menu, or keyboard shortcut is met by:

I addressed how to secure your document content in the PDF document format in my preceding post.

I had no issue creating a section master (now called Section Layout in Pages v11.2) watermark, based on a rotated Text box, whose text wrap was set to None in the Arrange panel. I entered the word D R A F T set at 122 pt, and the Text box enlarged for the expanded text. I rotated the Text box 45 degrees, and from the style panel, set the opacity at 15 percent. With the Text box selected, I chose Arrange menu > Section Layouts > Move Object to Section Layout.

To perpetuate this Section Layout effect throughout your document, you visit the first page of each section, select the Document toolbar item, click its Section tab, and select Match previous section.

Looks like this: