The question has come up many times: Can a Digimarc digital watermark persist within a PDF?

The answer is yes. When creating your PDF, you have many options under your control in regards to scaling and compression. As long as you adjust your settings appropriately, the watermark will persist. Ideally, you could choose not to downsample and not to use compression, and your image will remain as is.

But what if you need the PDF document size to be smaller and you have chosen to manipulate the image? When you go to Document -> File Size in Acrobat, avoid downsampling to less than 50% and set the image quality for the JPEG compression to medium or higher.

Please remember though, the results of the digital watermark are dependent on the image itself as well as the durability settings you used when applying the watermark in the first place. The higher the durability setting, the more robust the watermark will be, and the better it will work when embedded in a PDF