Drop the document into the emerald zone below, make your signature once, and click the page where it belongs. You can draw it with a finger on a phone, with a mouse on a desktop, type it in a handwriting face, or upload a photograph of your real signature on paper - and if you upload one, the white of the paper is measured out of the picture and turned transparent, so it lands as ink rather than as a grey rectangle. What you get is a visual signature mark placed on the page, the same thing you produce by signing a printout and scanning it back in, which is how an NDA, a supplier form or an internal approval gets signed every day. A qualified signature, the kind backed by a certificate on certified hardware, is something no web page can issue. The document is never uploaded. If you hold your own certificate you can add a cryptographic signature on top of the visible one.
Your files are read by JavaScript running on your own machine. There is no upload, no queue, and no copy on our server to delete later.
Drag a card to reorder it, or use the arrows under each card. The order here is the order in the output. Each card is a preview of the finished page, so what you see is what the PDF will contain.
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Starting
This is your processor doing the work, so the time it takes depends on your machine and not on how many other people are on the site.
The signing tool above is working right now. The guide below answers the question everybody actually has, which is whether a signature made this way counts - the three legal tiers of electronic signature and which tier this one produces, why that tier settles the overwhelming majority of documents, what attaching your own certificate adds, and why no web page can issue the qualified signature that a notary, a court or a property registry sometimes demands.
About two minutes for the first document and thirty seconds for every one after it, because the signature is remembered. This free PDF signature tool runs inside the page you are reading. The contract never leaves your machine and neither does your signature, which matters here more than on most tools, because your signature is the one asset on this site nobody should ever be asked to upload.
Drop the PDF into the zone above. Every page appears as a tile you can scroll through, so you can find the signature block on page fourteen of a lease without opening anything else first.
Press Make a signature in the panel above the pages. Draw is the default and it is the one most people want: sign with a finger on a touchscreen or hold the mouse button and write. Type renders your name in a handwriting face. Upload takes a photograph of your signature on paper and removes the paper. Tick the box to keep it on this device for next time.
Click a page tile to open it full size, then click the spot the signature belongs. Drag it into place and pull a corner to size it - the corners keep its proportions, so it cannot be stretched into a shape that is not yours. The Text tool adds a printed name, a title or a date beside it, and Initial draws directly on the page for the corner of every sheet.
Press Sign PDF. The mark is drawn into the page content itself rather than added as a floating annotation, so it survives flattening, printing and re-saving in other software. The result screen prints a SHA-256 fingerprint of the file that you can quote in the covering email so the recipient can prove they got exactly what you sent.
One signature can be placed on as many pages as you like without drawing it again. On a fourteen page agreement that wants initials in every corner and a full signature at the end, that is the difference between a minute and a quarter of an hour.
This is the question everybody has and almost nobody answers straight, so here it is straight. Under both the European eIDAS regulation and the United States ESIGN Act, a signature is not denied legal effect solely because it is electronic. That is the actual wording, and it is the whole foundation. What matters is intent, attribution and integrity: that you meant to sign, that the signature can be linked to you, and that the document has not changed since.
eIDAS then defines three tiers, and understanding which one you need is the difference between using this page and buying something you do not require.
| Tier | What it is | What it needs | Typical use |
|---|---|---|---|
| Simple electronic signature | Your mark on the document, applied with intent. This is what the tool above produces. | Nothing but you and the document. | The overwhelming majority of everyday agreements: NDAs, employment offers, supplier terms, consent forms, internal approvals, delivery notes. |
| Advanced electronic signature | A cryptographic signature from a certificate, uniquely linked to the signer, that detects any later change to the document. The certificate path on this page produces a signature of exactly that shape, though whether it satisfies the tier where you are turns on the certificate you hold and on who controls the private key. | A PKCS#12 certificate holding your private key. | Higher value contracts, regulated correspondence, anything where tamper evidence matters as much as intent. |
| Qualified electronic signature | An advanced signature made with a qualified certificate on certified hardware. Legally equivalent to a handwritten signature across the entire EU. | A smartcard, USB token or remote signing service from a qualified trust service provider. | Notarial acts, court filings, some property and banking instruments. |
No web page can produce a qualified signature, and this one is no exception. The private key for a qualified signature lives on certified hardware and is engineered so that no software anywhere can read it. That unreadability is the entire security property the certification exists to guarantee, so more work on this page could never close the gap. If a contract demands a qualified signature, use the application your trust service provider gave you.
For everyday business, the simple tier. Contracts are signed this way constantly and enforced constantly. What makes one stand up in a dispute is usually the evidence trail around it: the email thread showing who sent the document and who returned it, the timestamps on both, and a file that plainly has not been altered since. That is why the tool prints a SHA-256 fingerprint at the moment of download. Put the fingerprint in the covering email and you have a record that the file the other side holds is byte for byte the file you sent.
None of this is legal advice and none of it should be read as any. Jurisdictions differ, and specific instruments - wills, some property transfers, certain family law documents - are carved out and require wet ink or a qualified signature by statute. If the document matters enough to ask the question, ask a lawyer rather than a tool page.
All three produce the same thing: a transparent image placed on the page. What differs is how it looks and how much it looks like you.
Sign with a finger on a phone or a tablet, or hold the mouse button down on a desktop and write. The pad captures the stroke as a curve rather than as a chain of straight segments, and the line thickens and thins with the speed of the stroke the way a pen does. That single detail is most of what separates a signature that looks handwritten from one that looks traced by a machine.
Your name rendered in a handwriting face. Fast, legible, and perfectly acceptable for internal approvals and routine paperwork. One thing to understand about the list you are offered: these are the script faces already installed on the machine you are sitting at, and we do not send you any fonts. A Windows PC offers different ones from a Mac, and a Linux desktop may offer only a generic cursive. The list differs because the machine differs.
The consequence is smaller than it sounds. Your signature is rendered to pixels here, on your device, and those pixels are what goes into the PDF, so what you approve on screen is exactly what the recipient opens. Guaranteeing that two different people typing the same name got the same picture would mean shipping several megabytes of script fonts to everybody, to buy a property nobody needs.
Sign a white sheet of paper with a dark pen, photograph it with your phone, drop it in. This is the step every other free tool skips, and it is why signatures from those tools land on documents as grey boxes.
A phone photograph of white paper is not white. It runs from about seventy percent brightness in the shadow of your hand to a hundred percent under the lamp. A fixed threshold turns one half of the picture solid black and loses the other half entirely. So the engine measures the paper level out of the picture itself - the brightness the bulk of the pixels sit at - and makes everything near it transparent, with a soft band either side so the edges of the stroke stay smooth rather than turning into a stair pattern. Then it crops away the empty margin, so you place the ink rather than the sheet of A4 it was sitting on.
How to photograph a signature properly. Plain white paper, a black or dark blue pen with a reasonably thick nib, daylight from the side rather than a flash from the front, and hold the camera square to the page rather than at an angle. Ten seconds of care here produces a signature you will reuse for years.
A contract usually arrives as an email attachment, and email is read on a phone. So the moment somebody discovers they have to sign something, the device in their hand is the one they will try it on, and most web signing tools are close to unusable there. Two things were built specifically for that case.
The first is that the signature pad does not scroll the page. On a touchscreen, a downward drag is a scroll gesture unless the element says otherwise, so the first stroke of a signature moves the page instead of drawing and the tool appears broken. The pad explicitly claims the gesture, so a finger drawing on it draws.
The second is that the pad reads the batched pointer samples the browser collects between frames. On a 120 Hz phone that is the difference between a smooth curve and a chain of straight lines, and it is why a signature drawn here looks like handwriting rather than like a graph.
A genuinely good workflow if you sign often: photograph your paper signature once on your phone, upload it here, tick "keep this signature on this device". Every document after that is drop, tap, tap, download.
Optional, ignored by most people, and genuinely valuable when you need it. If you hold a PKCS#12 file - a .p12 or .pfx containing your certificate and its private key - attach it and the tool adds a real cryptographic signature on top of the visible one.
What that buys you is tamper evidence. The entire file is hashed, the hash is signed with your private key, and the signature is written into the document as a detached PKCS#7 blob covering every byte except the hole the blob itself occupies. Change a single character afterwards and the signature no longer verifies. Adobe Acrobat, and every other reader that checks signatures, will say so.
A green tick in the reader is a statement about trust, not about the signature. Acrobat validates the math and then asks whether it trusts whoever issued your certificate. A certificate from a recognized authority shows as trusted. A self-issued one shows "validity unknown" until the recipient chooses to trust it, and the signature is cryptographically sound either way, so it will still detect any change to the document.
From a certificate authority, usually as part of a business identity or document signing product, and it will cost something. Some organizations issue them internally from their own authority, which works perfectly for signing between colleagues who already trust that authority. If you do not have one and are not sure you need one, you almost certainly do not - the visible signature plus the fingerprint covers everyday business, which is why the certificate path is a button rather than a step.
Two decisions in the implementation are worth stating, because they determine whether the signature survives contact with other software.
A PDF can carry a signature as an annotation - a floating object layered over the page. It is easy to implement and it is fragile: annotations are removed by flatteners, dropped by some converters, ignored by some printers, and editable in any reader that lets you drag an object. This tool draws the mark into the page content stream itself, which is where the rest of the document lives. It prints, it flattens, it converts, it survives a round trip through another editor.
Where you drop the signature is recorded as a proportion of the displayed page rather than as a coordinate in screen pixels. That is what makes the same placement correct on a phone, on a 4K monitor, on a page stored sideways, and on a document mixing A4 and US Letter. The geometry that draws the preview is the same code that writes the PDF, which is what makes the preview a promise rather than a picture.
The signature itself becomes a transparent PNG rendered at roughly 680 dots per inch of its printed size. A drawn signature is captured as a curve and rasterized at that resolution rather than kept as vector strokes, which is a deliberate trade: it means the placement, dragging, sizing and writing all go through the same well tested path as every other image in the suite, and nobody will ever see a pixel at four times the resolution any printer uses.
Think about what an upload based signing service is actually asking. Send us your contract. Now send us an image of your signature. We will keep the second one so it is convenient next time. You have just given a company you have never met a reusable image of your legal signature, stored on their servers, alongside the documents you apply it to.
That is a database worth attacking, and it exists purely for convenience. This tool does not have one.
The saved signature lives in this browser's own storage, on this device. It is as safe as the machine it was drawn on, which is a promise that can actually be kept. Clearing your browser data removes it, and so does the small cross on the chip.
Verify it yourself. Load this page, turn off your network, then sign a document. It works end to end. No service that uploads your contract can do that, and the difference is not a matter of policy.
Every tool in this suite carries this section. Here is what this one cannot do.
The order matters, and one rule governs all of it: anything you do to a document after signing it invalidates the signature. That is the tamper detection doing its job.
| What you need | The order that works |
|---|---|
| A signed contract that also needs a password | Sign here first, then encrypt with Protect PDF. Encryption wraps the signed file without changing it. |
| Signature pages from several documents | Merge them first, then sign the combined document once. |
| A contract that arrived protected | Remove the password, sign, then put the protection back if the other side expects it. |
| Only pages three and four signed and returned | Sign the whole document, then extract those pages from the signed copy. |
| A scan of a signed paper contract to countersign | Run OCR so it is searchable, then sign. Doing it the other way round makes the text recognizer read your own signature as characters. |
And the habit worth building: quote the fingerprint. The result screen prints a SHA-256 of the exact file you are downloading. Paste it into the email that carries the document. It costs nothing, it takes five seconds, and it turns "here is the signed contract" into a record that can be checked years later. The rest of the PDF suite works the same way this page does: nothing uploaded, nothing stored, everything on your own machine.
Drop the document into the zone at the top of this page, press Make a signature, and draw it with a finger or a mouse, type it, or upload a photograph of your signature on paper. Then click the page where it belongs and press Sign PDF. No account is needed for a first run, nothing is uploaded, and no watermark is added.
In most cases yes. Under both eIDAS in Europe and the ESIGN Act in the United States, a signature is not denied legal effect solely because it is electronic. What matters is intent, attribution and integrity. The simple electronic signature this tool produces is a visual mark on the page, the same thing you get by signing a printout and scanning it, and it is used and enforced constantly for NDAs, employment offers, supplier terms and consent forms. Some specific instruments - wills, certain property transfers - are carved out by statute and need wet ink or a qualified signature. Jurisdictions differ and this is a tool page rather than legal advice.
No, and no web page can. A qualified signature under eIDAS requires a certificate held on certified hardware - a smartcard, a token, or a remote signing service run by a qualified trust service provider - engineered so that no software can read the private key. That is the security property being certified, not a gap in this implementation. If a contract demands one, use the application your provider gave you.
No. The PDF is read from your disk by the browser, signed in memory, and written back to your downloads folder. Your signature is not uploaded either, and neither is a certificate if you attach one. You can verify all of it by disconnecting from the internet after this page loads and signing a document anyway.
In this browser, on this device, and nowhere else. A signature is the one thing on this site that should never be uploaded - a server holding reusable images of people's legal signatures is a database worth attacking. Clearing your browser data removes it, as does the small cross on the signature chip.
Exactly as on a desktop, and it works properly. The signature pad claims the touch gesture so a downward stroke draws instead of scrolling the page, and it reads the batched pointer samples a modern phone produces, which is why the line comes out as a smooth curve. Sign larger and slower than feels natural and the result is excellent.
Yes, and it produces the best result. Sign white paper with a dark pen, photograph it, and drop it into the Upload tab. The white of the paper is measured out of the picture and turned transparent, so the signature lands on the document as ink rather than as a grey rectangle over whatever it was meant to sit on top of.
Yes. The mark is drawn into the page content itself rather than added as a floating annotation, so it behaves like the rest of the document: it prints, it flattens, it converts and it survives a round trip through other software. Annotation based signatures are the ones that go missing.
Tamper evidence. The whole file is hashed, the hash is signed with the private key from your PKCS#12 file, and the result is embedded as a detached PKCS#7 signature covering every byte. Change one character afterwards and the signature no longer verifies, and Acrobat says so. The visible signature carries intent; the certificate carries proof the document has not changed.
Because it does not recognize whoever issued your certificate, which is a question about trust rather than about the signature. The cryptography is intact either way and any change to the document will still be detected. A certificate from a recognized authority shows as trusted; a self-issued one shows as unknown until the recipient chooses to trust it.
Yes, and the signature only has to be made once. Click each page you need it on and place the mark. On a long agreement that wants initials in every corner and a full signature at the end, that is the difference between a minute and a quarter of an hour.
Yes. The Text tool inside the page view adds a printed name, a job title, a place or a date wherever you click. It is drawn into the page like the signature itself, so it survives everything the signature survives.
It is a SHA-256 hash of the exact file you are downloading. Quote it in the covering email and the recipient can prove the file they hold is byte for byte the file you sent. It costs nothing, takes five seconds, and creates an evidence trail that is worth more in a dispute than most people expect.
No. The output is your document with your signature on it and nothing else. No stamps, no trial banners, no attribution link, no account requirement to remove one. It is ready to send immediately.
All of these run the same way: your file is read by JavaScript on your own machine, the work happens on your processor, and the result is handed back to you as a download that never existed anywhere else.
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