Sign a PDF online, free

Drop the PDF onto the card at the top of this page. It opens with the Sign tool already picked, so you are one click from a signature.

Make your signature: draw it, type your name and pick a handwriting style, or upload a photo of the one you use on paper. It gets saved for the next document.

Click the spot on the page where it belongs, drag the corners until the size looks right, and download. The whole loop runs in the browser tab.

Drawing works with a mouse, a trackpad, or a finger on a touchscreen, and a finger on a phone gives the most natural line of the three.

Typing is the fastest. Enter your name, pick from the handwriting styles, done. It is what most people use for an offer letter or an invoice.

Uploading suits anyone who wants their real ink signature on the document. Sign a white sheet, photograph it, upload the picture. There is a separate tab for initials as well, which is what a lease usually wants on every page.

Click where it goes and the signature drops in. Drag it to nudge it, resize it by the corners, and repeat on as many pages as the document needs. Initials on every page and a full signature on the last one takes seconds.

On download the signature is drawn into the document itself rather than floated on top as an annotation, so it prints and displays the same in every reader.

If something in the document is wrong, you do not have to send it back. The same editor lets you click a line of existing text and retype it, white out a block, or move a page, then sign and download once.

Most documents that need a signature also need a name, a date, and an address filled in first. The Forms tool handles documents with real fields, and the Text tool types straight onto flat forms that have no fields at all. Same session, one download.

The print, sign, scan, email loop costs about fifteen minutes and needs a printer, a scanner or a phone camera, and a flat surface. Doing it on screen skips all of it, and the result is a clean digital page instead of a grey photograph of one. It also means the file never gets bigger or blurrier on the way.

Open this page in Safari or Chrome on the phone. There is no app to install and no account to make. Drawing with a finger gives a better signature than a trackpad does, so a phone is often the nicer device for this job. The signed file lands in your downloads ready to send back from the mail app.

Acrobat can sign, and so can Preview on a Mac, but one is a paid subscription and the other only exists on Apple hardware. This runs in any current browser, on any operating system, including a locked-down work laptop where you cannot install software. Nothing asks you to sign up before the download.

Nothing is uploaded. The PDF you pick is read straight into the browser tab, the signature is drawn there, and the finished file is built there too. There is no copy of your document on our servers, so there is no deletion window to take on trust.

That is true for signing your own document. Sending a document to somebody else for signature is a different job and does involve storing the file, because the other person has to open it. That difference is spelled out on the request page.

A scan signs fine. A signature is placed on top of the page as an image, so it does not matter that the page underneath is a picture rather than text. What you cannot do on a scan is click a line and retype it. If you need the text to be searchable or copyable, run OCR over it first.

An encrypted PDF will not open until the password is removed, so take the password off first (you need to know it), then sign the unlocked copy.

A Word document has to become a PDF before it can be signed, which is usually what you want anyway: PDF locks the layout, so the page the other side opens is the page you signed.

In the US, the ESIGN Act of 2000 and UETA give electronic signatures the same legal standing as ink for most agreements. The EU has eIDAS, and most other countries have something similar. Leases, offer letters, invoices, consent forms, and everyday contracts get signed this way constantly.

In a dispute, the questions are whether the signer meant to sign and whether the document changed afterwards. A record of who signed, when, and from where is the evidence that answers both. A signature you place yourself and download has no such record attached, which is fine for a form you are handing back, and not enough for a contract you may have to defend. For that, send it as a signature request instead.

An electronic signature is the visible mark, your drawn or typed name on the page. A digital signature is a cryptographic certificate embedded in the file that proves the bytes have not changed since signing. This tool makes electronic signatures, which is what everyday contracts ask for. If a government portal specifically demands a certificate-based digital signature, it will say so, and it needs a different kind of tool.

It does not check who you are. There is no ID document check, no knowledge-based questions, and no phone verification. It does not produce an advanced or qualified electronic signature under EU eIDAS rules, and it does not do Aadhaar eSign in India. Those need a certified provider. If nobody has told you that you need one, a standard electronic signature is almost certainly what your document expects.

Wills and codicils, some family-law paperwork like divorce filings, certain property deeds, and vehicle titles are the usual exceptions, and courts and registries in different places draw the line in different places. When the document is one of those, or when a lot of money rides on it, check the local rule before you sign on screen.

Signing your own document and collecting a signature from another person are separate jobs. To collect one, you upload the PDF, place the fields, and email a private link. They sign in their browser without making an account, you watch the status change from sent to viewed to signed, and the finished copy comes back with a tamper-evident audit log and a certificate of completion. The free plan covers 3 requests every 30 days.