How to make a signature here
The whole job takes about a minute, and every step happens in the tab you are looking at.
- Choose Signature or Initials. They are kept apart, so a drawn signature is not wiped when you switch to draw your initials.
- Choose Draw, Type or Photo. Draw gives you a wide pad with a dashed line to sign above; Type gives you a name box and a grid showing your name in every font; Photo asks for a picture of your signature on paper, from the camera on a phone or a file on a computer.
- Shape it. For a drawn signature, set the pen size (Fine, Medium or Bold), the ink colour and the amount of smoothing, and use Undo, Redo or Clear. For a typed one, pick a font and set the size, slant, letter spacing and colour. For a photo, turn it upright, drag the frame to crop or press Crop to the ink, and move the sensitivity slider until the paper disappears and the strokes stay whole.
- Check it against three backgrounds in the preview. Transparent shows the checkerboard where nothing will be printed; Dark shows any pale fringe left around the ink, which a transparent image should not have.
- Download it: a PNG at 600, 1200 or 2400 pixels wide or at the 300 × 100 email size, an SVG, a JPG on a white background, or a print sheet as a PDF.
- Save it under a name such as Full, Initials or Blue pen, or press Use in Sign PDF, which saves it and opens Sign PDF with it ready to place.
Files are named after what you called the signature, so a signature saved as Full downloads as full-1200.png or full.svg.
What happens to your signature: it stays on your device
A signature image is a small file with a large consequence. Anyone who has it can paste it onto a document, so where it goes matters more than for most images. On this page the drawing, the font rendering and the photo clean-up all run as code inside your browser tab. The strokes you draw, the name you type and the photo you add are never sent to a server; the only downloads are the tool’s own code and the font files, which come from this site like the rest of the page.
You can check this in about a minute. Open your browser’s developer tools (F12, or Cmd+Option+I on a Mac), choose the Network tab, then draw, type and download. You will see the page’s code, the handwriting fonts as small .woff files, and the site’s consent and analytics requests, which carry the page address and title and nothing you made. No request carries an image or your name. Are online PDF converters safe? explains the same check for any tool that handles your documents.
Treat the finished file like a key. Keep it in a folder only you use, delete old copies from Downloads, and prefer sending a signed PDF to sending the bare PNG, because a PDF signature is tied to one document while a loose image can be placed on any.
Draw, type or scan: which one to use
The three methods give three different things, and the honest answer depends on what the signature is for.
A drawn signature is made by your own hand at the moment you make it. With a stylus on a tablet it can look very close to the way you sign on paper; with a mouse it usually looks shakier and simpler. Its strength is that it is yours and nobody else draws it the same way. It is the natural choice when you will place it on contracts, forms and letters.
A typed signature is your name set in a handwriting font. It looks neat and is quick, and it is useful when you have no touch screen or when a clean, readable signature matters more than a personal one, for example on a letter or a quote. It is still a font, though: anyone who types the same name in the same font gets the same result, so it says less about who made it.
A scanned signature is your real paper signature, photographed and cleaned. It is the closest to how you sign on paper and the easiest for someone who knows your signature to recognise. It also needs the most care, because a high-quality copy of your real signature is exactly what a forger would want.
- For signing agreements and forms yourself: draw it, or scan your paper signature.
- For a letterhead, a quote or an email image where legibility counts: type it, or draw it slowly.
- For initials on every page of a long document: draw or type initials once and save them.
- When a document needs identity checks or witnesses: none of the three is enough on its own; read Are electronic signatures legally binding?.
Making a drawn signature look right
Most people’s first attempt on a screen looks worse than their paper signature, for reasons that are easy to fix.
Sign at your normal speed. Slow, careful strokes come out wobbly because every small hesitation is recorded. The pad turns speed into line width the way a real pen does: fast strokes thin out, slow ones thicken. A stylus that reports pressure, such as an Apple Pencil or a Surface or Wacom pen, is used directly, and a mouse or finger gets pressure worked out from speed.
Use the whole pad. The pad is three times as wide as it is tall, like the space on a signature line. Signing small in one corner and then scaling up enlarges every tremor. On a phone, turn it sideways for a wider pad.
Keep to the line. The dashed line is only a guide for your baseline; it is not drawn into the image. Signatures that drift upward look odd when placed on a document line.
Pick the pen size for where the signature will go. Fine suits small form fields and initials, Medium suits most documents, and Bold reads better when the image will be shown small, as in an email.
Use smoothing with care. Smoothing and a small stabiliser even out the shake of a mouse or trackpad by averaging the last few points of each stroke. A little helps; too much rounds off the sharp turns and loops that make a signature yours, and at the top of the range it starts to lag behind the pointer. If your strokes look shaky, try about 60 to 70%, then undo single strokes rather than clearing everything.
Every stroke is kept as points, not pixels. That is why the same drawing can be downloaded at 600 or 2400 pixels, or as an SVG, without getting blurry.
Typed signatures and the 22 fonts
The Type tab shows your name in all 22 fonts at once, from relaxed handwriting such as Caveat, Kalam and Shadows Into Light, through script styles such as Dancing Script, Sacramento and Pacifico, to formal copperplate such as Great Vibes, Allura, Pinyon Script and Parisienne, and loose signature styles such as Herr Von Muellerhoff, Zeyada and Italianno. Fonts that lack a letter in your name are greyed out; Caveat, Great Vibes, Marck Script, Bad Script and Pacifico also write Cyrillic names, and several write Vietnamese.
All of them are published under the SIL Open Font License 1.1, which allows use in documents and images without a fee. The licence and each font’s copyright line are shipped with the files at /fonts/signature/OFL.txt. Each font file is downloaded only when its preview scrolls into view or you pick it, and the same file is used for the preview, the SVG outlines and the text embedded in a PDF, so what you see is what the document gets.
Size, slant and letter spacing change the look without changing the font. A slight right slant of 4 to 8 degrees makes most upright fonts feel more like handwriting; spacing helps connected scripts that look cramped at large sizes. The size you set is the size the signature is first placed at in Sign PDF, in points.
Is a typed name a real signature? In many places, yes. The United States ESIGN Act, for example, treats a symbol adopted by a person with the intent to sign a record as an electronic signature, and a typed name can be that symbol. The weaker point is evidence: because anyone can type your name, a dispute turns on other proof that you meant to sign. Are electronic signatures legally binding? covers the rules by country and what counts as proof.
Photographing a signature on paper
A good photo makes clean-up almost automatic. Sign on plain white printer paper with a black or dark blue felt-tip or gel pen; ballpoint lines are thin and pale in photos. Sign a little larger than usual. Photograph in daylight or under a bright lamp, holding the phone directly above the paper so the signature is not skewed, and avoid your own shadow falling across it. Fill most of the frame with the signature.
On this page, turn the photo upright with Left or Right, then press Crop to the ink or drag the frame and its corners. The clean-up then works on the cropped area at up to 1,800 pixels on its longest side, which keeps even a 48-megapixel phone photo quick.
Paper is removed with an adaptive threshold. Instead of one cut-off for the whole photo, each pixel is compared with the average brightness of the area around it, so a shadow in one corner or light falling off across the page does not turn into a grey smear. The sensitivity slider sets how much darker than its surroundings a pixel must be to count as ink: raise it if thin strokes break up, lower it if shadow or paper texture comes through.
Despeckle then removes any dot of ink smaller than the size you set, which clears dust, paper grain and sensor noise without touching the dot over an i if you keep the setting modest. Finally every remaining pixel gets the chosen ink colour, with its transparency taken from how dark it was, so edges stay soft rather than jagged. Choose As photographed to keep your pen’s colour, or Black, Blue or Dark blue to make it uniform.
Under the before and after views, a note rates the result. A photo taken in dim or uneven light, or with a pale pen, gets a warning that ink and paper are close in tone, or that part of the photo was taken for ink, which usually means a shadow or the edge of the paper is inside the crop. Retaking the photo in better light nearly always does more than moving the sliders.
The result is a PNG with a transparent background: the paper is gone, not painted white, so it sits naturally on any document colour.
PNG, SVG or JPG, and which size
PNG with transparency is the format to use almost everywhere. It keeps sharp edges and has no background, so the signature sits on the document line instead of in a white box. Word, Google Docs, Pages, most PDF tools and email apps accept it.
SVG is a vector file: the signature is stored as outlines rather than pixels, so it stays sharp at any size and is tiny. Drawn and typed signatures export as true vectors, typed ones through the outline of each letter in the chosen font. A photographed signature is made of pixels, so its SVG simply wraps the PNG. Use SVG for design software, websites and large prints.
JPG cannot be transparent, so the JPG option puts the signature on white. Use it only where a form or portal refuses PNG.
Size is about pixels per millimetre on paper. Printing is usually judged at 300 dots per inch, which is about 11.8 pixels per millimetre. At that density the 600-pixel PNG prints sharply up to 50.8 mm wide, the 1200-pixel one up to 101.6 mm and the 2400-pixel one up to 203.2 mm. A signature on a document is usually 40 to 60 mm wide, so 1200 pixels covers every normal use, and 600 is plenty for screen documents.
The email preset is 300 × 100 pixels with the signature fitted inside it, a common size for the image in an email signature block. It is not an HTML email signature with your name, title and links; mail apps build that part themselves, and you add this image to it.
The print sheet is a one-page PDF with the signature at 40, 60 and 80 mm wide, a ruled line under each, and a 50 mm line to check the printer. Print it at 100%, not Fit to page, to compare with a paper original or to practise.
Initials and other versions
Contracts and leases often ask for initials on every page, and initials drawn at signature size look wrong. Switch to Initials and draw or type them on their own. When you type your full name under Initials, the tool suggests initials from it (Avery Jane Whitfield becomes A.W.), which you can edit.
You can keep up to 24 saved versions in this browser: a full signature, initials, a blue-ink version for documents that must look original, a shorter version for small form fields. Each keeps its drawing or text, not just an image, so you can reopen a drawn or typed one, adjust it and save it again. In Sign PDF, initials can be placed once and copied onto every page with one press.
Using your signature in Word, Google Docs, email and PDFs
In Microsoft Word, put the cursor where the signature goes, choose Insert, Pictures, This Device, and pick the PNG. Then set the picture’s text wrapping to In Front of Text so you can drag it onto the signature line without moving the text around it.
In Google Docs, choose Insert, Image, Upload from computer. Docs places images in line with text by default; choose In front of text from the image options to move it freely. In Apple Pages, drag the PNG onto the page or use Insert, Choose.
For email, open the signature settings of your mail app and use its image button. Some web mail services only accept an image that is already online, given as a link, rather than a file from your computer; in that case store the PNG where you control access, and remember that an image in every email is an image many people will have.
For PDFs, Sign PDF places your saved signatures, initials, dates and text on any page, fills in forms, and gives you the signed file without uploading it. On this site, the invoice generator, receipt maker and estimate and quote generator have a signature option for the documents you make there, and a typed signature suits the cover letter from the resume builder.
If the document you must sign exists only on paper, photograph the pages and make a PDF with JPG to PDF, then sign that PDF.
Keeping your signature safe
The risk with any signature image is forgery by copy and paste. It is not hypothetical: an image taken from one document can be placed on another, and a picture of a signature alone proves little about who put it there. Some habits reduce the risk without making the image harder to use.
- Do not post your signature on social media, a public website or a shared drive.
- Send signed PDFs, flattened so the signature is part of the page, rather than the separate image file.
- Use a slightly different version for everyday documents, such as initials or a typed signature, and keep your full scanned signature for documents that need it.
- When you no longer need a saved signature, delete it here and empty your Downloads folder of old copies.
- For high-value documents, prefer a signing service that records who signed and when, or a digital signature with a certificate; both are explained in the legal guide.
This tool will not help copy someone else’s signature: it cleans photos of your own signing, and the sample names on this page are invented. Signing another person’s name without authority is forgery in most legal systems.
Your data
Signatures you save are stored in this browser’s local storage under dtc.signatures.v1, on this device only: the drawing or text of each one, a PNG of it, its name and when it was saved. Nothing is sent anywhere. Clearing this site’s data or using a private window removes them, and another browser or device does not see them.
To move them to another device or keep a backup, press Export to a file, which downloads my-signatures.json, and Import a file on the other device. Treat that file like the signatures themselves. Delete all removes every saved signature from this browser at once. Your drawings, typed names and photos that you do not save are gone when you close the tab.
General information, not legal advice. Whether a signature image or a typed name is accepted depends on the document, the other party and the law where it is signed; some documents need a handwritten signature, witnesses, a notary or a certificate-based digital signature. Use this tool only to make your own signature.