Some time ago at the link Transparent foreground watermark, I learned from Gonzalo Medina's answer how to make transparent water maker with the package xwatermark. And it was awesome.
On the other hand, I learned about the usage of \usepackage[T1]{fontenc} to enable some features with accented characters, which is indeed very useful for me, a Portuguese LaTeX user.
First I thought [T1] fonts was useless and it only make the font looks ugly (big pixels), but than I found the others usages at Why should I use \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}?. I could finally copy and paste characters from the PDF, which is indeed useful. The solution for the "ugliness" came from the package lmodern in Is it still useful to load the lmodern package?.
And this point I was quite happy with the features but never had to use them together. Until last week when I used the transparent xwatermark, which is made using TikZ, in combination with [T1]{fontenc} and lmodern and then I realized the "ugliness" came back.
At first glance I thought it could be some issue from the packages xwatermark or TikZ. But it doesn't seem to be the case. The tikzpicture environment and the \newwatermark command of Example 2 in the MWE below led me to this hypothesis. The \newwatermark in Example 1 shows the "ugliness" issue. Maybe it is something related to the \newsavebox but I didn't find anything that could have helped me.
I would like to know why this happens and also if there is some solution to good looking water marks alongside the features from the package fontenc.
A MWE with both approaches is given below.
\documentclass{article} % ------------------------- %\usepackage[latin1]{inputenc} % Problem is independent from latin1 or utf8 \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} \usepackage[T1]{fontenc} % Enables Copy and Paste of special characters \usepackage{lmodern} % Makes [T1] letters pretty again % ------------------------- % ========== \usepackage{lipsum} \usepackage{tikz} % No PSTRICKS solutions please \usepackage[printwatermark]{xwatermark} % ========== % ========== Example 1 % Source: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/132582/transparent-foreground-watermark % It has opacity. The text behind is readable but loses quality when used with [T1]]{fontenc} and {lmodern} % ---------- \newsavebox\myboxb\savebox\myboxb{\tikz[color=blue!80,opacity=0.4]\node{\huge{Example 1}};} \newwatermark*[allpages, angle=45, scale=7, xpos=-20, ypos=+060]{\usebox\myboxb} % ========== Example 2 % It has no opacity. The text behind is not always readable and it never loses quality regardless of [T1]]{fontenc} and {lmodern} % ---------- \newwatermark*[allpages, color=blue!80, angle=45, scale=7, xpos=-10, ypos=-30]{\huge{Example 2}} % ========== \begin{document} \section{Título -- Title} Characters to test copy and paste: áéíóú, ãõ, âêô, à, äöü. \lipsum[1] \begin{tikzpicture} \draw[dashed] (0,0) node[below]{$x$ -- There is no problem between TikZ and [T1]fontenc} -- (0,1)node[above]{\huge{Example Ti\textit{k}Z} works fine}; \node at (3,0.5) {\Huge{Direct Node}}; \end{tikzpicture} \lipsum[2] \end{document} The first figure show the whole PDF and the second shows the zoom into the letters.
