How to Electronically Sign PDF Documents Without Printing and Scanning Them

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You've emailed the document, and you need to sign it and send it back. You can print the document, sign it, then scan it again and email it. But there is a better and faster way.

We'll show you how to quickly add your signature to any PDF document, saving it as a standard PDF file that you can read anywhere. You can do this on Windows, Mac, iPad, iPhone, Android, Chrome OS, Linux—any platform you want.

Electronic Signature, Not Digital Signature
First, let's get some terminology straight. This article is about electronic signatures, not digital signatures, which are completely different. A digital signature is cryptographically secure and verifies that someone with your private signing key (in other words, you) has seen the document and authenticated it. It's very secure, but also tricky.

An electronic signature, on the other hand, is simply an image of your signature overlaid on top of a PDF document. You can do that with any type of app, and that's what most people need when they send you a document to sign. Send them a PDF file with a digital signature and they won't know what to do. For many businesses, simply receiving signed documents by email instead of forcing you to fax them is a huge technological leap.

So of course, the method below isn't completely safe—but neither does it print something out, scribble on it with a pen, then scan it again. At least it's faster!

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