Sign PDF
Draw, type or photograph a signature and place it on the page.
This tool runs entirely in your browser. Your file is never uploaded, and you can verify that in your browser's network tab. Verify it yourself: open your browser's network tab and watch. You will see one small request asking whether you have tasks left - a tool name and a hash, never the file.
What this does
This places a picture of your signature on the page and draws it into the document's content, so the recipient cannot pick it up and move it. That is what almost every form, contract and delivery note is actually asking for. It is not a cryptographic signature: it cannot prove who signed or that nothing changed afterwards, and if you need that, Digital signature does it.
For everyday paperwork that asks for a signature and not for a certificate: a rental agreement, a school form, a delivery note, an invoice approval, an NDA that arrived by email. It is also the quickest way to sign something when the alternative is printing it, signing it and finding a scanner.
How it works
- Drop the PDF onto this page.
- Make your signature: draw it with a finger, stylus or mouse, type your name in a handwriting face, or upload a photograph of one on paper - a photograph has its white background dropped so it sits on the page rather than in a white box.
- Place it where it belongs and drag its corner to size it. Turn on sign every page if the document needs initialling throughout.
- Add the printed name and, if the form expects one, the date. Both are drawn in small grey type under the signature, where a printed signature block puts them.
- Press Sign PDF and the download starts on its own.
A drawn signature is an image, and it carries about the weight ink on paper carries: it shows intent, and it is worth what the surrounding evidence makes it worth - the address it came from, the document it sits on, the fact that you sent it back. Electronic signature law in most places treats that as a signature. What it cannot do is show that the file has not been altered since.
Flattening is on here and off almost everywhere else on this site, for one reason: a signature the recipient can select and drag off the page is not much of a signature. The image is written into the content stream and is already permanent, so flattening exists to fold in whatever form fields and annotations the document carried. The cost is that fillable fields become ordinary page content, so fill the form first and sign last.
A photograph of a signature brings the paper with it. The near-white pixels are dropped to transparency, which stops the signature arriving as a grey rectangle stamped across the text underneath. Dark ink, plain white paper and even light give a clean result; a photo taken in shadow keeps its shadow, because nothing here can tell a grey background from a grey pen stroke.
Around 180 by 60 points sits comfortably in most signature blocks, and that is where the tool starts - a very large signature over dense text looks wrong in print even when it looked right on screen. Both the image and the document stay in your browser, which matters here more than on most tools: how your signature looks is worth protecting on its own.
What this tool cannot do
- This is not a cryptographic signature. It says nothing about who applied it and cannot detect later changes to the document - use Digital signature when either of those matters.
- Flattening, which is on by default, turns fillable form fields into ordinary page content. Fill the form before signing, or turn flattening off.
- The signature goes on one page or on every page. Placing a different signature on each page takes more than one pass.
- The printed name and date are drawn as plain text below the signature at a fixed size; there is no control over their font or position.
Questions people ask
- Is a drawn signature legally binding?
- In most jurisdictions an electronic signature is valid for ordinary business documents - eIDAS in the EU and the ESIGN Act in the US both say so. What varies is what a court accepts as evidence that you applied it, and that comes from context rather than from the picture. Deeds, wills and some property transfers are excluded in several countries.
- How is this different from a digital signature?
- This draws a picture on the page. A digital signature computes a cryptographic value over the file's bytes with a private key, which lets any reader show who signed and whether a byte has changed since. If your recipient expects a green tick in Acrobat, they want Digital signature.
- Can I draw the signature with my finger?
- Yes, on a touchscreen or a trackpad, and with a stylus if you have one. If drawing with a mouse produces something you would not put your name to, type your name instead and it is rendered in a handwriting face, or photograph a real signature and upload that.
- How do I use a photo of my signature?
- Sign in dark ink on a plain white sheet, photograph it square on in even light, and upload the picture. The near-white background is dropped so the signature sits on the page instead of inside a white box. Shadows survive that treatment, so poor light brings its greys along.
- Does my signature image get uploaded?
- No. It is drawn or decoded in the page, embedded into the PDF by pdf-lib inside a Web Worker, and never leaves the device. Nothing is stored between visits either, so a shared computer keeps no copy once the tab is closed.