Sign a PDF online — without uploading it

1. Drop your PDF. Drag the contract, form, or agreement onto the box above. It is read locally and rendered page by page — use the arrows to find the signature line.
2. Create your signature. Draw it on the signature pad (pen sizes and black or blue ink are adjustable), or switch to Type and enter your name to get a cursive, handwriting-style signature.
3. Click the page to place it. After creating a signature, click the spot on the preview where it should sit. Drag it to fine-tune the position and use the size slider to scale it to the signature line. You can place as many signatures and initials as the document needs, plus an optional date stamp.
4. Download the signed PDF. Click the export button and the signature images are embedded into the actual PDF at the exact positions you chose — then download yourname-signed.pdf and send it off.

The entire flow typically takes under a minute — faster than printing, signing, and scanning, and with no account creation, no "3 free documents per month" limit, and no marketing emails afterwards.

Think about what you actually sign: employment contracts with your salary on them, apartment leases with your ID number, freelance agreements with client terms, medical and insurance forms, NDAs. Practically every popular "sign PDF online" service works by uploading that document to their servers, processing it there, and often storing a copy tied to a newly created account. For a casual document that's convenient; for a sensitive one it means the most confidential paperwork in your life sits in a third party's cloud, governed by their retention policy and breach record.

This tool takes the opposite approach. The PDF is opened with pdf.js directly in your browser tab, your signature is drawn on a local canvas, and pdf-lib — a JavaScript library running on your device — embeds the signature image into the file. At no point does the document, or your signature, travel over the network. You can disconnect from the internet after the page loads and the tool keeps working, which is the simplest proof of the privacy claim there is. For lawyers, HR teams, and anyone handling documents under confidentiality obligations, that architectural difference is the entire reason to use this tool.

Drawing produces the most personal result — it's your actual signature, captured with smooth curve interpolation so it doesn't look like jagged mouse scribble. On a phone or tablet, signing with your finger or a stylus feels close to paper, and the pad supports fine, medium, and thick pen strokes in black or classic blue ink. Blue ink is a small but useful trick: on a printed page it makes the signature visibly an original rather than a photocopy, and many people prefer it for that reason.

Typing is the fast path: enter your name and it's rendered in Caveat, a natural handwriting font, ready to place. A typed signature is perfectly acceptable for the overwhelming majority of everyday documents — timesheets, permission slips, internal approvals, delivery confirmations — and it always looks tidy, which your mouse handwriting may not. Both kinds produce a transparent PNG that sits cleanly on the page without a white box around it, and both can be reused across pages: every signature you create stays in the panel so you can place it again with one click.

Words matter here, so let's be precise about what this tool does. It creates an electronic signature — an image of your handwriting placed onto the document, the digital equivalent of printing a form, signing it with a pen, and scanning it back in. It does not create a cryptographic digital signature — the certificate-based kind where a mathematical key proves who signed and detects any later modification of the file. Tools like Adobe Acrobat with a certificate ID, or qualified e-signature providers, do that; a signature image, from this tool or any other, does not.

Does that matter for you? Usually not: the scanned-signature workflow this replaces has been standard business practice for decades, and most counterparties simply want to see a signed copy. In many jurisdictions — under laws like the U.S. ESIGN Act or the EU's eIDAS regulation — simple electronic signatures are broadly recognized for common agreements, with the legal weight coming from the parties' intent and the surrounding evidence (the email trail, for instance) rather than the pixels themselves. But for documents where the law or the counterparty demands a qualified or certificate-based signature — certain government filings, notarized documents, some financial instruments — use a certificate-based service instead. This isn't legal advice; when the stakes are high, ask the party requesting the signature what they require.

Real paperwork rarely needs just one signature. A lease wants initials on every page and a full signature at the end; a contract wants a signature plus a date; a form wants the same signature in three places. This tool is built for that: create your full signature once, create a smaller initials version (just type or draw your initials as a second signature), and place each one wherever it's needed. Every placement is independent — drag it, resize it with the slider, or delete it without touching the others — and the placement counter shows how many items you've added across the whole document.

The date stamp button places today's date as a text stamp using the same click-to-place flow, sized to sit naturally next to a signature on a "Date:" line. If the document also needs page numbers or a watermark before it goes out, the PDF page numbers and watermark PDF tools work on the same fully-private, in-browser basis.

For the technically curious — and for anyone who wants to verify the privacy claim — here is the whole pipeline. When you drop a PDF, pdf.js parses it and renders the current page to a canvas so you get a faithful, zoomable preview. Your signature is captured on a second canvas: drawn strokes are smoothed with quadratic curve interpolation through stroke midpoints (which is why the line looks like ink rather than connect-the-dots), then automatically cropped to the inked area so no invisible whitespace surrounds it. When you click export, pdf-lib opens the original file bytes — not the preview render — embeds each signature as a PNG with transparency, and draws it at your chosen position. Because PDF coordinates start at the bottom-left corner while screens measure from the top-left, the tool converts your on-screen placement mathematically, so the signature lands in the output exactly where you saw it in the preview, at any page size. The rest of the document is untouched: text stays selectable, links keep working, and file size grows only by the few kilobytes the signature image adds.

A signature drawn with a finger on a phone screen — or a stylus on an iPad — looks dramatically more like your real signature than anything a mouse produces, and this tool is built for that: the drawing pad responds to touch and pen input with pressure-free smooth strokes, and the whole layout works on a small screen. A practical workflow when the PDF lives on your computer but your handwriting lives on your phone: open this page on the phone, sign, and download the signed file there — or simply do the entire job on the phone, since placing and resizing works by touch too. There's no app to install and nothing synced through a cloud account in either case.

• Size the signature to the line. A signature that's 25–30% of the page width reads as natural on most contracts; the size slider shows the exact percentage while you adjust.
• Sign big, place small. Draw large on the pad — the signature is automatically cropped to its ink and scales down crisply. Drawing tiny and scaling up is what produces blurry edges.
• Use a touchscreen if you have one. The pad supports pointer, touch, and stylus input; a phone or iPad signature genuinely looks like your paper signature.
• Match the ink. If the document already contains blue-ink signatures from the other party, the blue pen setting keeps yours consistent.
• Check every page before exporting. Page through the preview once — placements are shown exactly where they will be embedded, so what you see is what the PDF gets.

• Freelancers and contractors countersigning client agreements and statements of work without a paid e-sign subscription.
• Renters and landlords signing and initialing leases page by page.
• Job candidates signing offer letters the moment they arrive, from any device.
• Small business owners signing quotes, invoices, and supplier forms — then compressing them with the PDF compressor when a portal has a size limit.
• Parents and students handling permission slips and enrollment forms without a printer.
• Anyone privacy-conscious who reads "upload your contract to our cloud" and closes the tab.