Sign docs electronically

How to Electronically Sign Documents Without Printing and Scanning Them

Here's how to quickly add your signature to any PDF document, saving it as a standard PDF file that can be ready anywhere. 

We are going to talk about Electronic Signatures, Not Digital Signatures. Digital signatures are something else entirely. A digital signature is cryptographically secure and verifies that someone with your private signing key (in other words, you) has seen the document and authorized it.

A digital signature is way more secure than a traditional ink signature or a signature image overlaid on top of a PDF document. But we won’t be using those here.

Why? The answer is simple — most people are expecting a document with a little scribble of ink on it. Send them a PDF file with a digital signature and they won’t know what to make of it. For many businesses, simply accepting signed documents by email rather than forcing you to fax them is a huge technological leap.

So sure, the below methods aren’t perfectly secure — but neither is printing something, scribbling over it with a pen, and then scanning it again. At least this is faster!

Instead of digital signatures, we’ll be using electronic signatures. They are just like traditional ink signatures, but applied electronically to documents without any printing or scanning required.

Adobe Reader

First, open the PDF document in Adobe Reader. If Adobe Reader detects a signature field, it’ll prompt you to open the Sign pane. If not, just click the Sign button at the top-right corner.

Use the Place Signature option to use a real signature. The other options here just add text, checkmarks, or initials — not good enough.

The Place Signature dialogue allows you to create a signature in a variety of ways:

Type my signature: Type your name and Adobe Reader will automatically generate something that looks like a signature from it. You’ll probably want to avoid this one, as you’ll want something that looks more like your real signature.

Use a webcam: Sign your name in black ink on white paper and Adobe Reader can use your webcam to capture its shape.

Draw my signature: Draw your signature with a mouse. If you have a stylus or amazing hand-eye coordination, you may be able to draw something that looks like your real signature, but this probably won’t be good enough.

Use an image: You can sign your signature to a piece of paper and use a scanner to scan it to your computer, then crop it and create an image file from it. If you do this, you can use the Use an image option to insert your signature from an image file.

Using a webcam will be the ideal option for most people. Sign a piece of white paper in black ink, hold it up to your webcam, and scan it in.

Adobe Reader doesn’t just take a photo of your signature — it generates a new signature that matches the shape of your signature, so it can be inserted cleanly into other documents.

Once you have scanned your signature, use the Place signature button to insert and position it anywhere in a PDF document.

You only have to scan in your signature once — you can quickly insert your signature in other documents in the future.

You can now save your PDF file using the standard Save option under the File menu. This will create a new PDF file with the same name as the original PDF, but with -signed at the end. Of course, you can name the new PDF anything you like.

Adobe will prompt you to use Adobe EchoSign to send your signed document, but you can just decline this offer to continue.