Sign PDF

Sign PDF draws a mark onto the pages you name and hands back a new copy with -signed added to the filename. Two sources are accepted. A typed name is set in one of eight of the standard fonts a PDF reader supplies itself — Times Italic by default — at anything from 6 to 120 pt, in an ink colour you pick. An image is taken from the queue instead: drop a PNG or JPG of your own signature beside the document and it goes in at the width you set, between 5 and 300 mm, with its proportions kept. That width is a ceiling rather than a promise: an unusually tall image is scaled down further so that it still fits the height of the page.

Placement is by coordinate rather than by dragging on a preview. X from the left and Y from the bottom are given in millimetres, measured against the media box — the whole sheet, as it is displayed — so a page carrying a rotation still takes the offsets you would read off the printed copy. Only the anchor point is bounds-checked: an X or Y past the sheet is refused with a message giving that page's width and height in points, but a long name anchored close to the right edge can still run off it, and a file whose crop box trims the sheet is measured against the untrimmed one. The page field takes last, first, a number, a range such as 8-10, a list, or all, odd and even — putting the same mark on every sheet is how you initial a contract instead of only endorsing its final page. A caption is optional, drawn 12 points below the anchor in small grey type, with {date}, {time}, {page}, {total} and {filename} substituted as it is written.

What this is not is a digital signature in the cryptographic sense. Nothing here holds a certificate, and no signature dictionary, trusted timestamp or audit trail is written into the file, so no reader will report the document as signed and verified and nothing will flag a later edit. What you get is ink on the page, carrying about the weight of a scanned wet signature — which is what most agreements, delivery notes and internal approvals actually run on, and is not what a counterparty asking for a certified esign, or a qualified electronic signature regime, will accept. It does not fill an AcroForm signature field either: the mark goes into the page's content stream, which a reader paints beneath any form field standing in the same spot, so send a document that already has one through Flatten PDF first.

pdf-lib does all of this inside the tab, so the offer letter, lease or invoice you are signing is never sent anywhere — which matters for a class of document that carries your name and the terms in the same file. Three smaller limits are worth knowing first. A typed name is typeset lettering, not handwriting, and only WinAnsi characters survive the standard fonts, so Cyrillic, Greek and CJK names arrive as question marks and want an image instead. A JPG signature brings an opaque rectangle with it and will cover the line it sits on, so export the cut-out as a PNG. And a password-protected document cannot be parsed at all until Unlock PDF has been over it.

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