Sign PDF

A signature placed here is a graphic drawn onto the page — your drawn strokes, your name set in a handwriting typeface, or an image you supply — positioned exactly where you put it and written into the document as page content. Once downloaded it is part of the page, not a sticker sitting on top of it, so it survives being emailed, printed, merged with other documents and opened in any viewer.

This is the electronic equivalent of signing a printed page, and for the overwhelming majority of everyday documents it is precisely what is wanted: a rental agreement, a consent form, a delivery note, a supplier contract, a school permission slip. It replaces the print-sign-scan ritual, which produces a worse document — a crooked, heavy, unsearchable photograph of what was previously a clean file.

What it does not do is prove anything cryptographically. The page shows that someone signed; it does not, by itself, demonstrate who or that nothing changed afterwards. That distinction matters for a small number of documents and for none of the rest, and knowing which you are handling is most of what there is to understand here.

Electronic signatures are legally recognised across most of the world, and the major frameworks — the ESIGN Act and UETA in the United States, eIDAS across the European Union, and comparable legislation in the UK, Canada, Australia and India — are deliberately technology-neutral. They do not specify a format. What they look for is intent to sign, agreement to transact electronically, and a record that associates the signature with the document.

In practice that means a signature like this one is enforceable for ordinary commercial and personal agreements, and disputes about them are far more often about whether a person agreed than about how the mark was made. Keeping the surrounding evidence — the email thread, the timestamps, the file as sent — is worth more than any property of the signature itself.

The exceptions are narrow and consistent between jurisdictions: wills and testamentary documents, some property conveyances, certain court filings and family-law instruments, and anything a specific regulator has said must be wet-signed or certificate-signed. If your document is in that group, or the value at stake makes the question worth asking, get local advice rather than relying on a general rule.

A digital signature is a different mechanism entirely. It computes a cryptographic hash of the document and encrypts it with a private key issued to you by a certificate authority, embedding the result in the file. Any viewer can then verify two things independently: that the document has not changed by a single byte since signing, and that the signature came from the key holder the certificate identifies.

That tamper-evidence is what regulated contexts require. Tax filings, tenders, court submissions, qualified signatures under eIDAS and many pharmaceutical and financial processes all mandate it, and no visible-image signature will satisfy them regardless of how it looks. Obtaining one means going to a certificate authority and proving your identity, which is the point — the trust comes from that verification, not from the software.

For everything else the visible signature is not a compromise, it is the appropriate tool. Most agreements have never had tamper-evidence, since a wet signature on paper offers none either.

Size and placement do most of the work. A signature should sit on the signature line rather than floating near it, and should be roughly the height of two lines of body text — signatures scaled up to a quarter of the page are the commonest giveaway that a document was signed in a hurry. Adding the date beside it, at body-text size, finishes the block properly.

If you are uploading a signature image, a transparent PNG is worth the two minutes it takes to prepare. A JPG carries its white background with it, and dropping a white rectangle onto a form covers the line it was meant to sit on and any text nearby. Drawing works best on a touchscreen; a mouse-drawn signature rarely resembles the one on your passport.

When the document is finished and going somewhere important, consider what happens next to it. Protect PDF can disable copying and extraction, which raises the effort needed to lift the signature image out for reuse, and Compress PDF is worth a pass if you have added a large signature photograph to an otherwise light document.