Electronic vs Digital Signature: Which One a PDF Actually Needs

“Sign this and send it back” is one sentence with two possible meanings, and the document rarely tells you which one you are looking at. Almost always it means: put your name on the line the way you would with a pen. Occasionally it means something far more specific — a cryptographic signature backed by a certificate issued to you. The two get called the same thing in conversation. They are not interchangeable, and reaching for the wrong one costs you either five minutes or a filing deadline.

This post separates them, says plainly which kind this app produces, and walks through signing a document in the editor. It ends with what the signed file does not contain, because that is the part that decides whether an electronic signature is the right answer for the document in front of you.

An electronic signature is your mark on the document. You draw your handwriting with a mouse, a finger or a stylus and place it where it belongs on the page. That is what people mean by signing a PDF almost every time they say it, and it carries the same weight as signing a printed copy and scanning it back — while staying legible, tightly cropped and correctly placed, which a phone photo of a signed page usually is not.

A digital signature is a cryptographic construct. A certificate issued to you by a trusted authority is bound to the document by a hash, so a reader can see who signed and when, and any later change to the file invalidates it. That needs a private key and a certificate authority standing behind it.

The wording is the tell, and it usually sits in the instructions rather than beside the signature line. Anything naming a certificate, a signing token, a qualified or advanced electronic signature, or a specific portal is asking for the cryptographic kind. Everything else — the overwhelming majority of paperwork — is asking you to sign it.

• An electronic signature is normally what is wanted: leases and renewals, permission slips, contractor agreements, invoice approvals, offer letters, and the forms a clinic, a school or an employer sends you.
• A certificate is genuinely required: some government filings and regulated corporate workflows say so explicitly. When they do, they say it in those words.
• Tamper-evidence is the requirement: if the other side has to prove the file has not changed since you signed it, an image of your handwriting cannot do that — and neither can a scan of a wet signature.
• Something else entirely is required: a notary or a witness is a separate legal step, and signing electronically does not replace it.

On the legal question, because every search on this subject arrives at it: in most everyday contexts an electronic signature generally carries the same weight as signing a printed copy by hand. In the United States, for example, the E-SIGN Act defines an electronic signature as a sound, symbol or process attached to a record and adopted with the intent to sign — deliberately broad, which is why a drawn mark counts at all. The rules differ by country and by document type, and some categories — wills and certain property and family-law instruments are the usual examples — are excluded or need extra formalities. That is general information rather than legal advice. If the document matters, read what it asks for.

1. 1

   Open the file

   Open the PDF in the editor. It is read from your disk into the tab — there is no upload and no account. A password-protected file opens once you enter the password, which decrypts it in memory and is not sent anywhere.

2. 2

   Draw the signature

   Choose Sign and draw on the canvas with a mouse, trackpad, finger or stylus. A touchscreen gets closest to your real signature; a mouse usually takes two attempts. Save it when the shape looks like yours.

3. 3

   Put it on the line

   Drag it so the baseline of the writing rests on the printed line rather than floating above it, then scale it from a corner handle. Signature resizing is aspect-locked, so scaling cannot stretch the strokes out of shape.

4. 4

   Reuse it for initials

   Long agreements want initials on several pages. Select the placed signature, use Duplicate, and drag the copy where it belongs — the drawing canvas opens empty every time, so duplicating is how one mark gets reused instead of redrawn.

5. 5

   Fill in the rest of the form

   A local scan reads the form fields already embedded in the PDF, the boxes and underlines drawn on the page, and the labels in the text, then merges them into editable fields. The date, the address and the reference number get typed in the same pass.

6. 6

   Export or print

   Export the finished PDF, or print straight from the tab. Open the export once afterwards and check the signature landed where you think it did.

The pages are copied through, so text that was selectable before stays selectable and the page count and page sizes do not change. Your signature is embedded as an image trimmed tightly to the ink with a genuinely transparent background, which is why it sits on the signing line instead of covering it with the grey rectangle a phone snapshot of a signature always brings with it.

It is a raster image, not a vector path and not a font. It is captured well above the size anyone signs at, so it stays clean at normal signing-line sizes, but stretched across a whole page it will eventually show its resolution, as any image would. One exception is worth knowing: if the source cannot be decrypted, or its internal structure is damaged, the export falls back to rebuilding the pages as images. That result is accurate on screen and on paper but no longer selectable text, so open the file and try to select a word if searchable text matters to you.

• Check that the signature sits on the line and does not overlap the label or the field beneath it.
• Match the date format the form itself uses, so there is no ambiguity about the day you signed.
• Remember that white-out covers rather than deletes — the text underneath is still in the file. The post on redaction covers what to do instead.
• Remove pages you do not need to send rather than painting over what is on them.
• If it is going out by email, add a password first and send that password by another route.