There’s been a long trail of discussions on the topic of adding watermarks to SolidWorks drawings. For one reason or another, watermarks are seen by some as necessary in drawings. The starting point of the conversion can be roughly traced back to the SolidWorks Forum in 2006. In December 2007, I did one article that incompletely addressed the need. If you just needed text to show up on your sheet format, you can review the first article.

Then, a question was asked at the first Stump the Chumps presentation at SolidWorks World 2008 about how to add watermarks to drawings. No answer was given at that presentation (the chumps where stumped).

Soon after SolidWorks World 2008, Ben Eadie (one of the stumped chumps) found an About SolidWorks article that discussed various aspects of this topic. (The article appears to have been maintained/updated since then.) Around that time, I also wrote a detailed article about how to link your custom properties to your watermark and provided a trick to get the watermark note to appear underneath elements on the drawing sheet. Linking custom properties to the watermark allows the watermark value to be controlled by Enterprise PDM workflows.

OK, so what was the trick to getting notes to appear underneath drawing elements? If you created a block of an annotation note on your sheet format, that note block will appear under your drawing (without obscuring drawing content).

In Solidworks 2013, you no longer need to use that trick to get your sheet format note to appear underneath drawing elements. There is now a command that resides in the right-click menu for each annotation note on the sheet format called “Display Note Behind Sheet”. When checked, the note is placed underneath drawing view elements on the drawing sheet, including other annotations, dimensions and model geometry in both HLR/HLV and shaded modes.

Display Note Behind Sheet is a checkmarked command in the

right-click menu for any annotation note on the sheet format.

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With the checkmark set on the note in sheet format, the

note appears under all drawing view elements.

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Uncheckmarking the option will apply standard ordering

of drawing elements, with geometry obsured by

the note.