AbstractWith ceaseless utilization of web and other online advances, it has turned out to be amazingly simple to imitate, discuss, and convey digital material. Subsequently, confirmation and copyright assurance issues have been emerged. Text is the most widely used media of communication on the web as compared with images and videos. The significant part of books, daily papers, websites, commercial, research papers, reports, and numerous different archives are just the plain text. Therefore, copyrights protection of plain text is a critical issue that could not be accepted at all. This paper presents a concise analysis on information hiding techniques and their consequences. Various watermarking systems properties are highlighted along with different types of attacks and their possible defenses. Additionally, the current applications for text document watermarking and the reasons for the problems of text document watermarking are described. Finally, attacks characteristics are discussed including types of attacks, volumes, and nature on text. Current watermarking approaches are reviewed in depth, and consequently, their advantages and weaknesses are highlighted. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.