Sign a PDF
Draw your signature, drop it where it belongs, and download the signed PDF — without the document ever leaving your computer.
Free · No sign-up · Your file never leaves your computer
No file handy? — generated here, not downloaded.
How to use it
- 1
Choose the PDF and pick the page to sign.
- 2
Sign in the box with a mouse, trackpad or finger.
- 3
Drag the signature on the preview to where it goes, and set its size.
- 4
Download.
When you would use this
Almost every agreement now arrives as a PDF and has to leave as one. The usual route — print, sign, photograph, crop, re-attach — produces a crooked grey scan and takes ten minutes. Placing a drawn signature directly on the page takes about thirty seconds and looks like the document was signed rather than photographed.
Be clear about what this is. It stamps a picture of your signature onto the page, exactly as a scanned signature does. Whether that binds you depends on the document and where you are — in many places it does for ordinary commercial agreements, and a great deal of business is conducted this way.
It is not a digital signature, and the difference is not pedantry. A cryptographic signature ties a verified identity to the exact bytes of a file, so any later change to the document invalidates it and anyone can check that. This does neither: it proves nothing about who applied it, and the document can be altered afterwards without trace. Where a signature must be provable — a deed, a tender submission, anything with a statutory form — you need a certificate-based service, not this.
Placement is by eye on the actual page, which is the point. Tools that ask for coordinates get used once. Drag the signature onto the line where it goes and set the size against the surrounding text; it should look like it belongs, not like a sticker. Around a quarter of the page width suits most signature blocks.
One security note that matters more than people expect: a transparent image of your signature is trivially reusable by anyone who obtains it. Signing here means it is drawn on your machine, used on your machine, and never transmitted — which is a materially different proposition from uploading a signature image to a website that keeps it.
Questions
- Is this a legally binding signature?
- It is a picture of your signature, exactly like a scan. Whether that binds you depends on the document and your jurisdiction — in many places it does for ordinary commercial agreements. It is NOT a cryptographic digital signature and does not prove who applied it or detect later changes.
- How is that different from a real digital signature?
- A digital signature ties a verified identity to the exact bytes of the file, so any later edit invalidates it. This stamps an image on a page; anyone with the image can stamp it anywhere. If you need the former, you need a certificate-based service.
- Can I sign more than one page?
- One page at a time. Choose the page, place the signature, download — then run the result through again for the next page. Most documents only need the signature block anyway.
- Why does it look faint when printed?
- Thin pen strokes at small sizes can drop out on some printers. Draw with a heavier thickness, or make the placed signature slightly larger.
- Is my document uploaded?
- No. The signature is drawn and the PDF written inside your browser. Neither the document nor the signature is ever transmitted — which matters, because a transparent PNG of your signature is reusable by anyone who has it.
Related tools
Signing the same kind of document every week
Ofivio routes documents to the person who has to approve them and records who approved what and when — so signing is an approval on a record rather than an edit to a file.
See Ofivio