I have written about ways to electronically put your signature on a PDF quite a few times (for example, using PDFPen or in Preview), but they have all been on the Mac. Today it is Windows’ turn.[1]
The latest version of Adobe Reader X has added the ability to drop your signature into a PDF. Previously, you needed the rather-expensive Acrobat X for this. Here is how it works:
Go Into Signature Mode
When you have your PDF loaded, the first thing you want to do is click the Sign button in the upper-right corner of Acrobat Reader.
If you don’t have a Sign button, you are probably using an older version of Reader. Head on over to Adobe’s site and grab Acrobat Reader X.
When you click the Sign button, you will now have three (ok, four, but we will deal with the fourth later) options:
- Add Text
- Place Signature
- Finalize Changes
Add Your Signature
In our case, we want to add our signature, so we will hit Place Signature.
Once you do this, a pop-up window comes up with instructions. Like most of these types of applications, you will need to write your signature on a piece of paper and then scan it in or take a picture of it with a camera or mobile device.
In this example, I used TurboScan on my iPhone to take a picture and then transferred it to my Windows machine.
Once you have your signature file on your computer, select it and hit Accept
Place, Resize, and Finalize
Once your have added your signature, you move the image to where you want it, and then drag the sides to size it.
When everything looks just right, click on Finalize on the right-side of the Window, and it will check with you to make sure that you want to embed your signature in the PDF. Once you click Finalize Changes, it will save a new signed PDF that you can send out.
Send For Signature?
You may have noticed earlier that aside from the three options under Sign Now, there was a fourth option with a Send For Signature button.
All this functionality came about because Adobe acquired EchoSign, an electronic signature company.
If you want to have a more sophisticated signing workflow where the PDF is securely sent to the recipient and the signatures are tracked, you can click that button and try it out. That’s a topic for another blog post though.
All in all, Acrobat Reader X’s signature functionality works well, and it is nice to have this in a free tool that you probably already have.
Do you have another way that you “sign” documents on Windows? Let us know in the comments how it is working for you.
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Since I am hopping on a plane for Macworld|iWorld tomorrow, I figure I should balance it out. ↩
