Well, all your other products, Cells, Word, Slides, all treat the watermarks or shapes separately so I was a little surprised to find for PDF's that text and shapes(stamps) are treated the same. I cannot attach a sample due to sensitivity, but I think I can explain it. If not I will get approval or generate a sample I can attach.
We have a document library maintained through Sharepoint. When a document is furst added it gets a watermark added "Pending {current timestamp}, when approved we automatically update the watermark to "Active {new timestamp} and when a new revision is added we then update the watermark to "Archive {another new timestamp}". This work brilliantly for all our Office dicuments. The problem is half our docs are PDF's and from what you are telling me, I can think of no way to search and replace text, where the text includes a timestamp, because I will not know the value of the timestamp.
thanks,
Shannon