Our Power Automate connector ‘Flowr‘ has long provided the capability to add both text and image watermarks to a PDF document with the following actions:
Last year, we released a new ‘Remove Watermarks from PDF‘ action to allow specific or all watermarks to be removed from a PDF document; this post will explore how to do this in Power Automate with the Encodian ‘Flowr‘ connector.
We’ll cover two scenarios within this post, and for both, we’ll create a very simple flow focussed on removing all or specific watermarks with the ‘Remove Watermarks from PDF‘ action. Let’s start with removing all watermarks:
1. Create a new ‘Instant cloud flow.‘
1.a. Flow name: Provide a name for your flow
1.b. Trigger: Select the ‘Manually trigger a flow‘ trigger action
1.c. Click ‘Create‘
2. Configure the ‘Manually trigger a flow‘ trigger action
2.a. Click ‘Add an input‘ > Select ‘File‘
3. Add the Encodian ‘Remove Watermarks from PDF‘ action
3.a. Filename: Select the ‘File Content name‘ property provided by the ‘Manually trigger a flow‘ trigger action
3.a. File Content: Select the ‘File Content contentBytes‘ property provided by the ‘Manually trigger a flow‘ trigger action
NOTE: The ‘Watermark Type‘ property allows you to select whether ‘All‘ watermarks, ‘Text‘ Watermarks or ‘Image‘ Watermarks should be removed and updated as needed.
Now, at this stage of the flow, the PDF document has been processed by the Encodian action, but we need to do something with the processed file. For this simple example, I will send the processed document as an attachment within an email to the user who triggered the flow.
4. Add the ‘Send an email notification (V3)‘ action and configure as follows:
4.a. To: Enter an email address or select the ‘User email‘ property provided by the ‘Manually trigger a flow‘ trigger action
4.b. Subject: Enter a relevant subject for the email
4.c. Body: Enter a relevant body for the email
4.d. Follow the animated guide to attach the processed PDF document to the email
NOTE: At the time of writing, there is a bug (well, several!) with the new Power Automate UI, where the ‘User email‘ property provided by the ‘Manually trigger a flow‘ trigger action is provided to the action encoded as a base64 string. Use the bae64ToString() expression to decode the value if required.
The flow is complete, and you can now execute the flow. I will process the following PDF document, which contains a single text watermark and a single image watermark:
Upon executing the flow, an email is received with the processed PDF document attached:
… and the watermarks have been removed from the processed PDF document.
Let’s explore how to configure the Encodian ‘Remove Watermarks from PDF‘ action to remove a specific watermark!
Removing specific watermarks requires the ‘ID‘ of the watermark to be passed to the Encodian ‘Remove Watermarks from PDF‘ action. All of the Encodian addition watermark actions return a ‘Watermark ID‘ so that you can later target the watermark for removal if required.
Consider the following flow configured to add a a text watermark, save the file, remove the watermark and save the file… not exactly a real-world requirement. Still, it does outline the process of adding and removing watermarks. Currently, the Encodian ‘Remove Watermarks from PDF‘ action is configured as follows:
As detailed earlier in this post, this configuration will remove all watermarks from the PDF document. Now, to remove a specific watermark, I need to pass the ID of a watermark (or multiple IDs comma separated) to the ‘Watermark IDs‘ property as follows:
The Encodian ‘Remove Watermarks from PDF‘ action will now only remove watermarks which match the ID(s) provided and configured ‘Watermark Type‘.
We hope this post provides a useful guide for removing watermarks from a PDF document using Power Automate and the Encodian ‘Flowr‘ connector. If you require further assistance, please review the documentation on our support portal or raise a ticket with our support team.
Please share any feedback or comments – all are welcome.
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