Use Preview In Lion To Capture Your Signature

I have written a number of times about the built-in Preview in Mac OS X (or Preview.app to Mac nerds). It is a pretty great tool for working with paperless documents, and the price (free) doesn’t hurt either.

With the release of Lion, Apple has a cool new feature that is relevant to us paperless types – the ability to capture and use your signature (hat tip to awesome DocumentSnap reader Ron who told me about this way back before I had Lion installed).

You know the drill. You download or receive a PDF form, and you have to print it, sign it, scan it (or worse, fax it), and send it back.

That isn’t as bad of a workflow as it used to be, and I’ve written a few times (here and here for example) about how you can do that. However, the Lion Preview update makes it so that you don’t even need a scanner. Here is how it works.

Capture Your Signature

Fire up Preview and hit the Annotations button on the toolbar (the one that looks like a pen).

Then hit the Signature button, and choose Create Signature from FaceTime Camera (Built-in)…

I suspect that if you have an external camera hooked up you could use that too, but I haven’t tried that myself.

Then grab a piece of paper and write your signature. I have found that using thicker ink (like a gel pen) works best, but ballpoint will probably be fine.

You will feel like a bit of a goof doing this, but hold up the piece of paper to your Mac’s camera. Move it closer until your signature is taking up the box and the bottom is touching the blue line (don’t worry about the fact that your signature looks backwards).

Once it is touching the blue line, you’ll see a preview of what your signature will look like. Pretty cool right?[1]

When it looks good, hit Accept.

Use Your Signature

That’s great that Preview can capture your signature, but what can you do with it?

For starters, when you click on the Signature button in the Annotations toolbar, you should now see your captured signature like this:

To use it, click on your signature and then move the mouse cursor to the signature line in your PDF. Click, and you’ll see your signature there on the page.

Use the mouse cursor to move the signature to just the right place, and you can click and drag on the the circles around the edge of the signature to resize it.

When you have it the way that you like it, hit the Annotations button again and the circles will be gone. Your signature is now in the document.

My Thoughts

You can, of course, use this for anything else you can capture with your camera, not just signatures. Be creative and come up with other ideas.

One possible downside of Lion’s implementation of this feature is that it is black & white only. If you want to capture your signature in, say, blue pen, you’ll want to use another tool. I use PDFPen for that personally.

How about you? Do you “sign” your documents with a scanned signature? How do you do it?