Sign PDF documents in your browser
Sign PDF forms, contracts and letters without printing and scanning them. Create your signature by drawing it, typing your name or uploading a picture of it, then click the spot on the page where it belongs. You can add a date, sign several pages and download the signed copy straight away. The PDF and your signature stay on your device: nothing is uploaded.
Three ways to create your signature
Draw
Sign in the box with a mouse, a trackpad, a stylus or your finger on a phone or tablet. Strokes are smoothed as you draw, the pen thickness is adjustable, and Undo stroke removes the last line without starting over. The finished signature is cropped to the ink and saved at about three times the size you drew it, so it stays sharp when printed.
Type
Type your name and choose one of four handwriting styles. They use script fonts that are already installed on your device, such as the ones that come with Windows, macOS or your phone, so nothing is downloaded. Because devices ship different fonts, the same style can look a little different from one computer to another.
Upload
Already have a scan or a phone photo of your signature on white paper? Upload it as PNG or JPG. With Remove white background ticked, the paper becomes transparent and the edges of the ink are softened, so only your handwriting lands on the page. Large photos are scaled to at most 1,600 pixels and cropped to the signature.
Drawn and typed signatures can be black or blue.
Place, move and resize
- Place: click or tap a page, or use Place here above it.
- Move: drag the signature. With the keyboard, Tab to it and use the arrow keys; hold Shift for bigger steps.
- Resize: drag the square in the corner, or press + and −. Signatures keep their proportions.
- Several pages: place it on as many pages as you like, or select one and choose Copy to all pages for initials on every page.
- Date or text: switch to Date / text and pick today's date in one of four formats, or type your own text such as a place or your printed name.
- Undo reverses the last change, and the red cross removes an item.
How the signature is written into the PDF
Each signature is stored once as a PNG image with a transparent background and drawn on every page where you placed it. Dates and text are added as real text in Helvetica, one of the standard PDF fonts, so they remain searchable; it covers Latin letters, digits and common punctuation. Positions are converted from the screen to the PDF's own coordinates, taking page rotation and cropped pages into account, so the signature appears exactly where you put it in any PDF viewer. The rest of each page, including text, links and other content, is left as it was.
Password-protected PDFs are not changed, because saving them would remove their protection: remove the password with Unlock PDF first (you need the password). If a PDF already carries a certificate-based digital signature, the tool warns you, because any change to the file makes that existing signature show as invalid.
Electronic signature or digital signature?
| This tool (image signature) | Certificate-based digital signature | |
|---|---|---|
| What is added | A picture of your signature, plus optional text | A cryptographic seal tied to a digital ID |
| Shows who signed | Only visually | Verified through a certificate |
| Detects later changes | No | Yes |
| Needs | Nothing | A certificate from a provider |
An image signature suits everyday paperwork such as delivery notes, rental forms and permission slips. Some documents call for a certificate-based digital signature or a handwritten original instead. This page cannot tell you which one applies, so if in doubt, ask whoever sent you the document what they accept.
Before and after signing
Got the paper version only? Photograph each page and combine the photos with JPG to PDF, then sign the result here. To send a signed form together with other documents, join them with Merge PDF. To remove the author name and other hidden properties before you share it, use the PDF metadata remover.
Privacy
Rendering the pages, creating the signature and writing the new PDF all happen in your browser. Your document and your signature are not uploaded or stored, and they are gone when you close the page.