webtools

Sign a PDF

Private: your file never leaves this device

sign above with a mouse or a finger
Draw your signature in the box above.

Drop the PDF here, or click to choose one

Up to 100 MB. It is opened on this device and never sent anywhere.

Make a signature, then drop in the PDF you want it on.

Draw your signature, photograph one you have already signed on paper, or type it, then drag it onto the page and save. The signature is drawn onto the page as an image and the rest of the document is left exactly as it was, so the text stays selectable. Everything happens on your own device.

About signing a PDF

Almost every request to "sign a PDF" is really a request to put a picture of your signature in the right place on the page and send the file back. A rental agreement, a delivery note, a school form, an NDA between two people who already trust each other: what the other side wants is the page back with your name written on the line. That is what this does, and it does it without the file ever leaving your computer.

There are three ways to get a signature in. Drawing it with a finger on a phone or a trackpad is the quickest, and the stroke is smoothed as you go so it looks like handwriting rather than a seismograph trace. Photographing one you have signed on paper is the one most people should use, because it is genuinely your signature: the photo is converted to greyscale, the brightness of the paper is measured separately in each part of the picture so a shadow across one corner does not matter, and what is left is your ink on a transparent background. Typing is there for initials and dates, and it is honestly the weakest of the three.

Once the signature exists it is placed by dragging. Every page of the document appears as a thumbnail, clicking one opens it underneath, and the signature becomes a box you move with a pointer and resize by a corner. The shape is locked to the signature's own proportions, because a stretched signature looks wrong in a way people notice without being able to say why. You can put it on as many pages as you like, which is what initialling every page or adding a separate date field needs.

Saving embeds the signature as a PNG on the pages you chose and touches nothing else. The document is not rasterised and no other object in it is re-encoded, so text is still selectable, links still work, and the file grows by roughly the size of the signature image. That is also the order to do things in if the document is too big to send: sign first and compress afterwards, because compressing turns every page into a picture. A page that already carries a rotation is handled properly, which sounds obvious and is the part that most tools get wrong: a PDF measures from the bottom left of the unrotated page, so on a sideways page the signature ends up in the margin at ninety degrees unless the conversion is done correctly.

How to sign a PDF

  1. Pick how you want to make your signature: Draw it, Photo of paper or Type it.
  2. For a photo, sign a blank sheet with a dark pen, photograph it in reasonable light, and drop the picture in. Nudge Ink threshold until the whole stroke is solid, and Paper cleanup until the background is gone.
  3. Check the preview. It shows exactly what will be placed, trimmed to the ink.
  4. Drop in the PDF. Every page appears as a thumbnail.
  5. Click the page you want, press Put my signature on this page, then drag the box into position and pull a corner to size it. Repeat for any other page.
  6. Press Sign and download. The signed file saves straight to your device.

Common questions about signing a PDF

Is this a legally binding digital signature?
No, and it is worth being clear about it. This puts a picture of your signature onto the page. It is not a cryptographic digital signature: there is no certificate, no identity check, nothing that binds the signature to you, and no tamper seal, so a reader will not show a green "signed by" banner and nobody can prove from the file alone who made the mark. That is exactly what almost every free "sign a PDF" service on the web does, and for most things it is what people actually want: returning a completed form, a delivery note, a consent slip, an agreement between people who already trust each other. For anything that turns on legal non-repudiation, a property transfer, a court filing, a contract you expect to be challenged, you need a qualified electronic signature from a certificate authority or a service such as DocuSign or Adobe Sign, and you should not use this.

Where does my document go when I sign it?
No. Your PDF, your photograph and your signature are read, combined and saved entirely by JavaScript on this page, and none of them is sent anywhere. The libraries are served from this site rather than somebody else's, so no request about your file goes to any third party at all. The page thumbnails need a renderer that is fetched from here the first time you open a document and cached afterwards, which is the one thing this page does that needs a connection. That matters more here than on most pages: a signature is the single most sensitive thing most people ever upload to a website, so check it rather than believe it. Open the Network tab of your browser's developer tools and sign something: every request listed is for this site's own code, and not one carries your PDF, your photograph or your signature. Then disconnect from the internet, leaving the page open, and sign another document. It works, which it could not if anything were being sent.

Which way of making a signature is best?
Photographing one you signed on paper, by a clear margin. It is your real signature, made with a pen at normal speed, so it looks like the one on your passport rather than like something drawn with a mouse. Sign a blank white sheet with a dark pen, photograph it square on in daylight, and use the two sliders to lift the ink off the paper. Drawing is a good second best on a phone or a tablet, where a finger or a stylus is close enough to writing. Typing is last: it produces a font, not your hand, and it looks like one.

Can I sign more than one page?
Yes, as many as you like, and more than once on the same page. Open a page, press the button to add the signature, position it, then open the next page and do the same. Each placement keeps its own position and size, so you can initial the corner of every page with a small mark and sign the last one full size. The thumbnail of any page carrying a signature is marked, so you can see at a glance which ones you have done.

Why does my typed signature look like ordinary text?
Because your device has no handwriting font installed. This site self hosts one typeface and deliberately does not download a second one just for this, so the typed mode asks the browser for a generic cursive family and takes whatever it finds. Windows and macOS usually have something; many Linux installs and some Android builds have nothing, and the browser falls back to its default. It also means the result depends on the device, not on you, which is the main reason typing is the weakest of the three options here.

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