Draw your signature, type your name in a handwriting font, or use a photo of the one you write on paper, then put it on the page. You can sign a PDF this way for free, with no account and no watermark, and the document never leaves your machine.
There are three ways to make the signature you use to sign a PDF.
Draw. Write your signature with a mouse, a trackpad, a finger or a pen. The drawing is cropped to the ink, so a small signature does not arrive on the page surrounded by empty margin.
Type. Type your name and pick one of three handwriting fonts: Dancing Script, Great Vibes or Caveat. The name is saved as outlines and not as text in a font, so it looks the same in every PDF reader. The fonts ship with the app and are not fetched from anywhere.
Image. Choose a PNG or JPEG: a photo or a scan of your signature on white paper works best. The app can remove the white background, with a threshold you can adjust while you watch the preview, and it crops the picture to the ink. The transparency is kept, so the signature does not cover the line it sits on with a pale rectangle.
Whichever way you make it, you can give the signature a name and choose its ink colour. It is saved on your own device, so the next time you need to sign a PDF it is already there.
Each of the three ways to sign a PDF is walked through, button by button, in How to add a signature to a PDF.
The signature is placed on the page as an annotation: a drawn one as ink strokes, a typed or image one as a stamp. It is a visible mark, the equivalent of signing a printout, and any PDF reader shows it.
Because it is an annotation, someone who opens the file in an editor can select it and delete it. If the signature has to stay put, flatten the document, which makes the markup part of the page. The steps are in How to flatten a PDF.
When you sign a PDF that already carries someone else's digital signature, your mark is saved by appending it to the file. The bytes the existing signature covers are not touched. There is more on that in Two ways to save a PDF.
This is not a digital signature. OpenPdfEdit does not sign a PDF with a certificate, and it does no cryptographic signing of any kind. Nothing in the file ties the mark to your identity, and nothing detects a change made after you signed.
If whoever asked for your signature needs a certificate-based digital signature, this is the wrong tool, and we would rather say so here than after you have sent the file. Whether a visible signature is enough depends on who is asking for it, and that is not a question this page can answer for you. The two kinds are compared in Electronic signature vs digital signature.
For a document that already has digital signatures, the app can list what the document itself declares about each one. It does not verify them. The list is labelled as claims only, because it shows what the file says and not whether that is true.
Most sites that let you sign PDF online work by upload: the contract goes to their server, you sign it there and download the result. To sign a PDF here, nothing is sent. The web app does the work in the page itself, and the desktop app does it on your computer. The signature you saved stays on your device as well. OpenPdfEdit is an open source PDF editor, so none of this has to be taken on trust: the code is public.
If the document is a form, you can fill out a PDF form first and sign it afterwards, in the same window.
Make your signature once, place it, save. Nothing to install and nothing to sign up for.
Guides: How to add a signature to a PDF · Electronic signature vs digital signature · How to flatten a PDF · Two ways to save a PDF · All guides
It is free. There is no account, no limit on how many documents you sign and nothing of ours stamped on the page. The only paid tools in the app are watermarking and OCR.
No. It places a visible signature on the page as an annotation. It does not create a digital signature backed by a certificate, and it does not verify the digital signatures a document already has.
Yes. The web app lays itself out for a phone screen, and you can draw the signature with a finger and tap the page to place it.
Place the signature, then flatten the document. Until you flatten, the signature is an annotation that an editor can select and delete. After flattening it is part of the page.
No. A saved signature is kept on your own device, in the app's local storage, so you can reuse it. It is not uploaded, and neither is the document you sign.
Yes. Your signature is added as an annotation and the save appends it to the file, so the bytes the earlier signature covers are left as they were.