How to sign a PDF here
Most documents take two or three minutes. The sample buttons load an invented contract and a form with fields if you want to try it first.
- Open the PDF. Its pages appear as a strip of thumbnails above a large view of the page you are on. A password-protected file asks for its password beside the file name.
- Choose Signature under Add to page. Pick one saved in this browser (from the Signature Maker or an earlier visit), or draw or type one in the panel. It is placed on the first empty signature field the PDF has, fitted to it, or near the bottom of the current page if there is none.
- Drag the signature where it belongs and resize it from a corner; the proportions stay the same. Add Initials, a Date, Text or a Mark the same way.
- If the PDF is a form, fill its fields in the form panel. Values appear on the page as you type.
- Under Finish, choose whether to lock the form, whether items become part of the page or movable stamps, and whether to add a signing summary page.
- Press Sign and download. The signed copy downloads as the original name with -signed added, so lease.pdf comes back as lease-signed.pdf. Compare with the original shows the same page before and after, drawn from the new file.
Placed items stay on the page until you download, so you can move between pages, zoom, and come back to adjust anything before signing.
What happens to your document: it never leaves the tab
Most online signing services work by uploading your document to their servers, adding the signature there, and keeping a copy for a time set by their policy. For a contract with your address and bank details, a medical consent form or a tax form, that is a lot to hand over just to add a signature. Here the PDF is read into this tab’s memory by pdf.js, the placed items and form values are written into a new copy by pdf-lib, and the result is handed to your browser as a download. No request carries the file, its name, its pages, your signature or anything you type.
The 60-second check: open your browser’s developer tools (F12, or Cmd+Option+I on a Mac), go to the Network tab, then open a PDF, sign it and download. You will see the tool’s code and the handwriting fonts load from this site, plus the site’s consent and analytics requests, which carry the page address and title only. Nothing is the size of your document. Are online PDF converters safe? describes the same check for any website.
What kind of signature this is
Placing an image of your signature, or your typed name, on a PDF makes what the law usually calls a simple electronic signature. In the United States the ESIGN Act and the state UETA laws say a signature may not be denied legal effect just because it is electronic; in the EU the eIDAS Regulation says the same for electronic signatures in general; in the UK the courts and the Law Commission have confirmed that electronic signatures can validly sign most documents. For an employment offer, a lease renewal, an NDA, a quote you accept or a consent form, it is normally enough.
Be clear about what it is not. It is not a digital signature: unless you add the optional digital seal described below, there is no certificate and no cryptographic seal that shows the file has not been changed since. It is not an advanced or qualified signature in the eIDAS sense, which need a link to your identity that a picture cannot provide. And there is no identity check or audit trail: nothing records who placed the signature, from which device, or when, beyond the file’s own dates and the optional summary page you can add yourself.
In a dispute, a simple signature is proved the way a paper one is, by surrounding evidence: the emails in which you received and returned the document, what happened next, and whether the other side accepted it. Are electronic signatures legally binding? sets out the rules in the US, the EU, the UK and eight other countries, and which documents still need ink, witnesses or a notary.
Placing signatures, initials, dates and text
Everything you place is an item you can select, move, resize, turn, align, duplicate and delete until you download.
- Signature and Initials: from your saved list, or drawn or typed on the spot. Tick Also save it on this device to keep a new one for next time. A drawn signature is placed as vector outlines, so it stays sharp at any zoom; a typed one is placed as real text in the chosen handwriting font, embedded in the PDF; a photographed one is placed as its transparent PNG.
- Date: today by default, taken from your device’s clock, or any date from the date picker, in formats such as 09/30/2026, 30/09/2026, 2026-09-30, 30 September 2026 or 30.09.2026. The format you pick is remembered.
- Text: a name, title, company, reference or any short line, in plain Inter or one of the 22 handwriting fonts, at the size and colour you choose. {page} and {pages} become the page number and page count, and {date} the date, which makes “Page {page} of {pages}” or “Initialled {date}” possible.
- Marks: a check mark, a cross, a circle for ringing an option, and a strike-through line for crossing out a clause both parties agree to remove.
- After placing a signature you can add a small “Signed by … on …” line under it, with the name you type and the date.
Drag an item to move it and drag a corner to resize it. Everything can also be done from the keyboard: Tab to an item, then the arrow keys move it by one point (ten with Ctrl or Alt), Shift with the arrow keys makes it larger or smaller, R turns it by 90 degrees, and Delete removes it. The toolbar under the page turns, duplicates, aligns to the page margins and copies to every page.
Signature fields in the PDF are outlined in blue and form fields in amber. Drop a signature inside a signature field and it snaps to fit.
Placement is exact on pages that are rotated or cropped. A PDF page can carry a rotation, or show only part of its page area; a signature placed naively then lands sideways or off target. Every item here is mapped through the same transformation the viewer uses, and on our test pages rotated by 90, 180 and 270 degrees, with a cropped visible area and with a page area that does not start at zero, every item landed within 1 point (0.35 mm) of where it was dropped.
No black “redaction” box is offered on purpose. A box drawn over text hides it on screen, but the text is still in the file and can be copied or searched out. Real redaction deletes the content itself.
Filling in forms
Many PDFs from employers, landlords, schools and government offices are fillable forms: they contain fields with names, types and sometimes formats. The tool reads those fields and lists them in a form panel, grouped by page, with the control each one needs: a text box, a date picker for fields formatted as dates, check boxes, radio buttons, a drop-down or a list. Values are written into the PDF’s own form, so another PDF reader sees them as filled fields, not as text pasted on top.
Each field keeps its own settings. A field with a fixed font size keeps it, a field that auto-sizes still auto-sizes, a date field formatted as mm/dd/yyyy gets a date in that shape from the date picker or the Today button, and a field with a character limit will not take more. Read-only fields are shown but cannot be changed.
A signature field is listed too, with a Put my signature here button that places your saved signature inside it. That places your signature image in the field’s position on the page; it does not turn the field into a digital signature.
Lock the form, on by default, flattens it after filling: each field’s look is drawn into the page and the fields are removed, so the values cannot be changed and every viewer, printer and phone shows the same thing. Check boxes and radio buttons are included, which some tools drop when flattening. Switch it off to keep the fields live, for a form someone else still has to complete.
A PDF that is only a scan of a paper form has no fields. Sign it the same way, placing text items for the answers and check marks for the boxes.
Initials and dates on every page
Leases, loan papers and long contracts often ask for initials in the corner of every page, which is tedious on paper and in most free tools. Place your initials once, where they belong on one page, select them and press Every page. A copy appears in the same place on each page; on pages of a different size, the position is kept in proportion. Remove copies takes them all off again.
The same works for a date or a text item, and page tokens make it page-aware: a text item reading “Initialled, page {page} of {pages}” becomes “page 7 of 60” on the seventh page. Each copy is still its own item, so you can nudge one that sits on a page with a different layout.
On a 60-page test document, initials on every page plus a summary page were written into the signed copy in well under a second on a desktop computer; the time is spent drawing the pages you look at, not on the copies.
Part of the page, or movable stamps
By default every placed item is drawn into the page itself, the way ink sits on paper. It prints everywhere, looks identical in every PDF reader, and cannot be selected and dragged away in another viewer. This is what you want for a finished signed copy.
Movable stamps adds each item as a stamp annotation instead: a separate layer that Adobe Acrobat, Preview, Edge and most readers let you select, move or delete. It is handy for a draft you want someone to adjust, or for marks you expect to change, but it is a poor choice for a final signature, because anyone who receives the file can move or remove it without trace.
Either way the original file you opened is not changed. The signed copy keeps the document’s title, author and other details, with its producer set to this tool and its modification date updated.
Password-protected, restricted and already-signed PDFs
A PDF that needs a password to open asks for it beside the file; it unlocks the file in this tab only. The signed copy is saved with the same password by default (AES-256 encryption), because a file that arrived protected should not leave unprotected by accident. You can switch that off, or set a new password.
Some PDFs open without a password but carry restrictions set by their author, such as no changes to the content. Adding a signature is a change, so such a file is refused with an explanation. The tool does not remove or work around restrictions; ask the sender for a copy that allows signing, or for their preferred way of collecting your signature.
A PDF that already carries a digital signature, from a bank, a court, a government portal or a signing service, is protected by it: the signature covers the file exactly as it was signed. The tool warns you when it finds one and asks you to confirm. If you go ahead, your additions are written as an update appended after the signed version, so that version stays inside the file byte for byte and can still be checked on its own. Expect readers to flag the result, though. In our test with pyHanko, a PDF validator, the earlier signature still checked out as cryptographically sound for its own version, but it was judged invalid overall because marks were added to its pages afterwards, which an ordinary signature does not permit. Keep the signed original, send it alongside your signed copy, and ask the sender whether they expect you to sign this way.
The digital seal: what it adds and what readers will show
A signature image says “I signed this”. A digital signature says something different: “this file has not changed since it was sealed, and this certificate sealed it”. It is a cryptographic value calculated from the exact bytes of the file with a private key and stored inside the PDF with the certificate. Change a single byte afterwards and the check fails.
Switch on Add a digital seal under Finish to seal the signed copy. The seal is made in this tab: the file is hashed with SHA-256 and signed with an RSA key held by your browser as non-extractable, so the key cannot be read out of the page, and nothing is sent anywhere. Your placed signature becomes the seal’s visible appearance, with a small “Digitally sealed by” line under it, and PDF readers list it in their signature panel. With no signature placed, the seal is invisible on the page.
There are two ways to get a certificate. Make one here from your name and email: it is a self-signed certificate valid for one year, which you can download as a password-protected .p12 file, or keep on this device encrypted with that password, to seal future documents with the same identity. Or use your own .p12 or .pfx certificate from a certificate provider, unlocked with its password in this tab.
What the reader shows depends on the certificate, and it is worth being exact. We validated sealed files with pyHanko, an independent PDF signature validator. With a self-made certificate the seal was “cryptographically sound” and covered the whole file, but the certificate was “untrusted”, so the overall verdict was not valid: the file provably has not changed, but nobody vouches for who sealed it, because anyone can make a certificate in any name. With a certificate from a test authority the validator was told to trust, the same seal was judged valid and trusted. Your own provider certificate shows as trusted only in readers that trust its issuer, such as Adobe’s Approved Trust List or an EU trusted list. In every case, changing one byte of a sealed file made the check fail.
Two limits, plainly. The seal is not a qualified electronic signature under the EU eIDAS Regulation, which requires a qualified trust service provider and a certified signing device. And no trusted timestamp is added, because that needs a timestamp service on the internet; the signing time is your device’s clock. Seal last: merging, compressing or editing the file afterwards breaks the seal, which is what it is for. A sealed copy cannot also be password-protected here.
When you need more than this tool
This tool signs your own copy. Some situations need more, and it is better to know before you sign:
- Collecting other people’s signatures: sending a document to several people, in order, with reminders, needs a signing service with accounts and a server. This tool does not send documents or collect anyone’s signature.
- An audit trail: services such as DocuSign, Adobe Acrobat Sign and others record email addresses, IP addresses and times for each step and issue a certificate of completion. That record is the main evidence in a dispute over a high-value agreement.
- Notarisation and witnessing: deeds, many powers of attorney, affidavits and wills in most places need a witness or a notary present. Some places allow remote online notarisation through approved platforms; a PDF you sign alone does not meet that.
- Qualified or government-grade signatures: some tenders, company filings and court documents require a qualified electronic signature or a national e-ID signature.
- Documents that must stay on paper: some property transfers and certain family and estate documents still require wet ink in many jurisdictions.
Are electronic signatures legally binding? explains each of these by country. How to sign a PDF compares the free signing tools built into Windows, macOS, iPhone, Android and Chrome, if you prefer those.
Your data
The PDF, its pages, everything you place and every value you type stay in this tab’s memory and are gone when you close it. Only your choices are remembered, in this browser’s local storage under dtc.filetools.v1: the text font, size and colour, the date format, and the lock-the-form, stamps, summary and keep-password settings. Signatures you choose to save are kept separately under dtc.signatures.v1, on this device only; manage or delete them in the Signature Maker. A seal certificate is kept only if you tick the box to keep it, under dtc.sealcert.v1, encrypted with AES-GCM under a key derived from its own password, and the Remove button deletes it. There is no account, no history and no copy of your document anywhere but your device.
General information, not legal advice. A signature placed with this tool is a simple electronic signature; whether it is accepted depends on the document, the other party and the law where it is signed, and some documents need witnesses, a notary, a qualified signature or ink on paper. Check the signed copy before sending it, keep the original, and sign only documents you are entitled to sign.