How to sign a PDF without printing it

The print-sign-scan loop is one of the last genuinely unnecessary office rituals. It costs paper, needs a scanner, and produces a worse document than you started with — a crisp digital file becomes a grey photograph of itself, several times larger and no longer searchable.

You can put a real signature on the page instead, and the result stays a clean PDF.

How to do it

1. 1Upload the PDF and open it in the editor.
2. 2Click Sign. A panel opens where you draw your signature with the mouse, a trackpad, or a finger on a touchscreen.
3. 3Draw it. A trackpad takes a couple of attempts; drawing slowly gives a steadier line than trying to be quick.
4. 4Accept it, then click the spot on the page where it should sit.
5. 5Drag to reposition and use the handles to resize. Signatures usually look right a little smaller than feels natural.
6. 6Download the signed PDF.

The signature is placed as an image with a transparent background, so it sits over the line on the form rather than covering it with a white box.

Signing on a touchscreen

If you have a phone or tablet to hand, use it. A finger or stylus on glass produces a far more natural signature than a trackpad, because you are making the same movement you make with a pen. The site works in a mobile browser, so you can upload, sign and download from the phone directly.

Is this legally valid?

In most jurisdictions, including the United States, the United Kingdom and the European Union, an electronic signature is legally binding for ordinary agreements. The relevant frameworks are the ESIGN Act and UETA in the US, and eIDAS in Europe.

A drawn signature is a simple electronic signature. It is the same legal category as signing on a delivery driver’s handheld device, and it is accepted for the overwhelming majority of everyday documents — contracts, forms, letters of consent, expense claims.

Filling in the rest of the form

A signature is rarely the only thing needed. Use Add text for dates, names and reference numbers, and Add shape with a filled square for tick boxes. If the form is a scan, run recognition first so the existing text becomes selectable — useful when you need to correct a pre-filled field rather than add to it.

Initials, dates and multiple signature points

Long agreements often want initials at the foot of every page as well as a signature at the end. Draw the initials as a second signature and place them one page at a time; each placement is independent, so you can size the initials smaller than the full signature without affecting it.

Dates are usually best added with Add text rather than drawn, because a typed date is legible and a drawn one frequently is not. Match the size to the surrounding text and place it on the same baseline as the label next to it.

When the PDF has real form fields

Some PDFs are interactive forms: the boxes are genuine fields that a viewer can fill, rather than lines printed on the page. These behave differently from page content, and text you add sits on top of the field rather than inside it.

For most purposes that is fine, because what matters is how the finished document reads and prints. If a recipient specifically needs the field data to be machine-readable, fill the form in a viewer that supports fields first, then add the signature here.

Telling them apart is easy: open the PDF in Chrome and click a box. If a cursor appears inside it and you can type, it is a real field. If nothing happens, it is a printed line.

A note on where your signature goes

The drawing is turned into an image inside your browser and placed on the page like any other image. Nothing about it is stored separately or kept after your document is deleted, and it is not reused between documents, which does mean drawing it again next time.

That is a deliberate trade. Storing signatures would be more convenient and would mean holding one of the more sensitive things a person can give a website. Since the site has no accounts, there is nowhere to keep it that would be worth the risk.