Sign a PDF
Draw your signature, put it where it belongs on the page and download the signed document. The document never leaves your device.
Drop a PDF here or click to choose
Signed on your device — never uploaded
This is an electronic signature. It adds a picture of your signature to the page. It is not a digital signature: there is no certificate, no cryptography and no tamper-evident seal. Once stamped, the image is ordinary page content — anyone with a PDF editor can move or remove it, and nothing in the file proves who signed it or that the document has not changed since.
2. Put it on the page
Make a signature above and it will appear here.
Click anywhere on the page to move the signature there, drag it to adjust, or drag the corner to resize. With it focused, arrow keys nudge it and Shift + arrow keys resize it.
How to sign a PDF
- Drop your PDF into the box above, or click it to pick a file.
- Make your signature. Draw it with a finger, a stylus or a mouse, or upload a picture of one you have already signed on paper and lift the white background off it.
- Turn to the page you need, then click where the signature should go. Drag it to adjust, drag the corner to resize, or use the arrow keys — Shift and the arrows resize it.
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Press Sign PDF and download
contract-signed.pdf. Open it in your own reader and check it before you send it on.
Electronic and digital signatures are not the same thing
Both get called "signing a PDF" and they are different pieces of technology. It is worth two minutes to know which one you are being asked for, because this tool only does one of them.
An electronic signature is a picture of your signature placed on the page. That is what this tool makes, and it is what the free tier of every online PDF signer makes. The result is a PDF with an image on it — nothing more and nothing less.
A digital signature is cryptography. A certificate authority issues you a certificate, you hold a private key, and signing writes a seal into the document that is computed from every byte of it. Change one character afterwards and the seal stops matching, and a reader will say so. It also ties the signature to an identity somebody has checked.
We cannot do the second one, and we would rather say so than blur the line. A certificate has to be issued to a person by an authority that has verified who they are, and the key has to stay under that person's control. A static website that never sees your file, never asks your name and has no server to keep anything on is exactly the wrong shape for that — and any site offering you a "digital signature" without ever checking your identity is not giving you one either.
| Electronic (this tool) | Digital (certificate-based) | |
|---|---|---|
| What is added | An image on the page | A cryptographic seal over the whole file |
| Proves who signed | No | As far as the certificate's issuer checked |
| Detects later changes | No | Yes — the reader flags a broken seal |
| Can be removed by an editor | Yes, like any image | Removing it is visible |
| Needs a certificate | No | Yes |
Which one a particular document needs is not something a web page can tell you. A permission slip, a delivery note or an internal form is usually signed with a picture and nobody minds; a deed, a mortgage or anything a regulator will look at may well not be. If it matters, ask whoever is asking you to sign.
Why sign in the browser?
Look at what is actually in the documents people sign. An employment contract with a salary in it. A tenancy agreement with your new address. A medical consent form. A settlement you are not allowed to talk about. The usual online signer asks you to upload every one of those to a server you know nothing about, and then asks for an email address so it can send the result back.
Your signature itself is worth a thought too. It is a piece of biometric handwriting you reuse for the rest of your life, and once it is a file on somebody else's machine you have no say in what happens to it. Draw it here and it stays a canvas in your own tab; the only copy that leaves is the one inside the PDF you download to your own disk.
There is no upload step here, no account and no watermark, because there is no server side to put one on. Your browser opens the document, draws your signature onto the page and hands you back a new file it made itself. Close the tab and the working copy is released from your browser's memory — the privacy page sets out what this site does and does not keep.
Frequently asked questions
Is this a digital signature?
No, and the difference matters. A digital signature is cryptographic: a certificate issued to you, a key only you hold, and a seal written into the file that changes if a single byte of the document changes afterwards. Adobe Acrobat and DocuSign do that. This tool makes an electronic signature — a picture of your signature drawn onto the page. There is no certificate, no key and no seal, because a site that never sees your file and never asks who you are has nothing to issue one from. Whether an electronic signature is acceptable for a particular document depends on the document and on who is asking for it; that is a question for them, not for this page.
Can someone remove or move the signature afterwards?
Yes. Once stamped, the signature is ordinary page content — an image sitting in the page like any other image. Anyone with a PDF editor can move it, resize it, delete it or copy it onto a different document, and nothing in the file records that they did. The file also carries no proof of who signed it or that the text above the signature is the text that was there when you signed. If that is a problem for what you are signing, you need a certificate-based signature from a tool built for it.
Is my PDF uploaded to a server?
No. The document is drawn for you by pdf.js and rewritten by pdf-lib — and, if it arrived locked against editing, unlocked first by qpdf — all of them running inside your own browser tab, and the signed file is created on your machine. There is no upload step, no queue and no account. The page and processing engines still make ordinary network requests, and the site is ad-supported, but those requests do not contain your document. The verification guide explains how to check that boundary in the browser network panel.
My uploaded signature still has a white box around it.
Turn on "Remove the white background". It decides pixel by pixel on brightness alone: anything bright enough is treated as paper and made transparent, anything dark enough is kept as ink, and the range between the two is faded out so the edges of the stroke stay soft. That works well for dark ink on clean white paper in even light. It struggles with grey or cream paper, a shadow falling across the sheet, a photograph taken at an angle, and pale or thin ink — in those cases part of the paper survives, or part of the signature disappears. The preview below the box shows exactly what will be stamped, on a checkerboard so you can see what is really transparent.
Can I put the signature on every page?
Yes. Set "Place on" to "Every page" and the same mark goes in the same relative position on all of them — the usual way to initial a contract throughout. Each page is measured separately, so a document that mixes portrait sheets with a landscape insert gets the signature in the same visual spot on both, at the same proportions, rather than stretched to fit.
Can it sign a password-protected PDF?
It depends which lock. Most PDFs people call protected open in any reader with no password at all and carry an owner password only, to say “no editing”. That lock is taken off on your device as the file is read, the tool tells you it happened, and signing works normally. A PDF that asks for a password before it will open is a different thing: nothing here can read it, and it says so rather than producing a broken file. There is nowhere on this site to type a password in. Open it in your usual reader, save an unprotected copy, then bring that copy back.
Can I check the signature landed correctly before sending it?
Yes, and you should. Download the signed file and open it in your own PDF reader — not just the preview here. Check the page number, the position, and that nothing important is hidden underneath the signature. If it is wrong, nothing has been lost: your original is untouched on disk, and you can drop it back in and place the signature again.