Teleworking has been greatly promoted in recent years, and many of the day-to-day procedures are already carried out remotely through the internet. If you have to sign a contract or document, you will see that normally the file that they send you to sign is in PDF format. How can you sign a PDF for free, without using paid programs?
If you have a mobile phone, you can sign PDFs for free quite easily, with the additional advantage that it is much more comfortable to write the signature using the phone’s touch screen.
How to Sign a PDF Document on PC for Free
Most of the PDF editors for PC are usually paid, which can be a nuisance if you only want to sign a document and are not going to take advantage of the rest of the features offered by premium PDF editors for PC.
Luckily, what not many people know is that the classic Adobe Acrobat Reader, in addition to reading PDF files, also allows you to sign them without spending a single penny. Let’s see how it works.
Step #1: Install Adobe Acrobat Reader on your PC
First of all, download and install Acrobat Reader from the official Adobe website. On the download page, you will find two options, the “Reader DC” version and the “Pro DC” version. Select the Reader DC version, as the other is the paid version.
Step #2: Write your signature and save it to a JPG file
The next step will be to create an image file containing your signature. To do this, you can use Windows Paint or any other drawing tool that you have available on your PC.
Writing the signature with the computer mouse does not usually give very natural results. For this reason, it is recommended to use a digital pen for the best results. As an alternative, you can also install a drawing app on the phone, make the signature with the finger from there and then send it to the PC via email, Google Drive, Dropbox or similar. In this way, you will also obtain a quite natural signature stroke.
Lastly, make sure that you have saved the signature to a JPG or BMP image file. You also need to ensure that the signature is on a white background.
Note: Don’t worry, if you don’t have any drawing tools you can also draw your signature freehand afterwards, directly from Acrobat Reader itself.
Step #3: Use the “sign” feature in Acrobat Reader
Now that you have everything ready, it is time to insert the signature in the PDF document.
- Open the Acrobat Reader program.
- Sign in to the app. You can use your Google, Facebook, Apple account or create a free Adobe ID from https://account.adobe.com.
- Click on “ File -> Open ” to select the PDF document that you are going to sign.
- In the top menu, click on “ Sign -> Fill and sign ”.
- Next, click on the “Sign” button (drawing of a pen) and click on “Add signature”.
- Here, you will have 3 options to insert the signature. You can click on “Text” to add the signature in text format. With the “Draw” button, you can draw the shape with the mouse at the moment, and with the “Image” button you can add the signature you created a moment ago in step #2.
- Click on “Apply” to place the signature on the document.
- To finish, click “Next” and select “ Save as a read-only copy ”.
- Now that you have the signed document, we will go to “ File -> Save As ” to save a copy of the already signed PDF document.
As you can see, the Adobe PDF viewer allows you to sign documents on PC in a fairly simple and intuitive way. In addition, it has other interesting functions such as the possibility of requesting the signature of other people in case the document requires it, or the possibility of obtaining a link to share the document in the cloud.
