Not everyone has one printernot to mention a to scan in her house. And unfortunately, there are times when they send us a document that we have to return signed, which would normally require us to print it, sign it, then scan it in order to send it back. However, if you don’t have a printer, scanner, tablet or any of the three, don’t worry, because you can always easily sign documents on your PC and we’ll teach you how.
Even though we live in the digital age, signed documents are still necessary, and if it is impossible for you to physically go where you need to go to sign a document, do not worry because anyone with a Windows PC can do it. The only thing you will need to install, yes, is Adobe Acrobat Reader
Prepare your signature and save it on the PC
We all have a unique signature, so for the most part it’s quite difficult to reliably create your signature, for example using the mouse in Paint. For this reason, the ideal is that if you do not have a scanner, that you sign (if possible with a black pen) on a blank sheet and, with good lighting but without reflections, take a photo of the signature with the cellphone. Then transfer the image to the computer and crop it so that only the signature is visible on a white background, without too many margins.
Ideally, once you have that, it would be to edit the image in Photoshop to remove the white background using the “magic eraser” tool and thus save it as an image with transparency in PNG format, but let’s keep it simple and save it in JPG format. The important thing here is that your signature is saved in an image on the PC, because it will be the one we will use later to sign whatever the documents are.
How to sign a document with Acrobat Reader
The first step is to open the document you want to sign, which will usually be in PDF format, with Adobe Acrobat Reader. Then you will see that in the upper area there is a menu called Sign, so click on it and then on the “Fill and sign” option. A toolbar will appear below (above the PDF content), find the “Sign” button and select the “Add signature” option.
Now Acrobat Reader itself will give you the option to write your name in a font that looks manual, although that’s not very “personal” to say. You can also draw your signature with the mouse, but the interesting thing is the third option, insert an image, which is precisely the intention.
Once done, you can click Apply, but make sure you leave the bottom left option checked, Save Signature, to skip this step the next few times and you already have your signature ready to insert.
When you click on Apply, you can directly move the signature with the mouse to place it exactly in the desired position.
And it’s done, all you have to do is press the File menu and Save to save the PDF with your signature inserted, as simple as that. With the file already signed, you can email it, and as you’ll see, you didn’t need to use a printer or scanner for that.
