How to add text and a signature to a PDF

Preparing a signature image that looks professional

A photographed or scanned signature usually looks far better than one drawn with a mouse or trackpad, and it takes only a minute to prepare. Sign your name on plain white, unlined paper with a dark pen — black or dark blue ink photographs cleanly, while pale, metallic, or felt-tip inks wash out. Work in bright, even light, for example near a window with the flash off, and hold the camera or phone parallel to the paper so the strokes don't skew or stretch.

Crop the image tightly around the strokes so almost no empty paper remains. A loose crop leaves a visible white rectangle floating over the document; a tight crop melts into the page. You don't need a large file: a signature a few hundred pixels tall stays crisp on screen and in print, and a small image keeps the exported PDF lean — handy when the file must travel as an email attachment, which is typically 20–25 MB depending on the provider.

Size the signature to match the document. A signature that towers over the surrounding text looks pasted on; one that is tiny looks tentative. Scale it so its height roughly matches the line it sits on or the space the form provides, and keep the proportions locked so the strokes don't stretch wider or taller. Then zoom out to full-page view and check that it reads as part of the page rather than an overlay.

Prepare the image once and reuse it for every form. Keep it in a private folder on your own device — and note that with a browser-based editor the file is read locally and never uploaded, so a signature image stays as private as the PDF itself.

When should you bother with an image instead of simply drawing? Drawing inside the Sign tool is fastest for one-off forms, and typed or drawn signatures are widely accepted for everyday agreements. A prepared image wins for anything recurring — monthly reports, weekly timesheets — because it looks identical every time and takes seconds to place. For regulated or high-value documents, check what your counterparty requires first: rules on signature types vary by country.

Filling out forms that have no form fields

Plenty of real-world forms — rental applications, medical intake sheets, school registrations, delivery receipts — are flat PDFs: printed lines and boxes, but no clickable fields. The Add text tool exists for exactly this case. It lets you type anywhere on the page, so each printed line becomes a field you create yourself, with no special form software required.

Click near the line where your answer belongs, type, then nudge the text until its baseline sits on the printed line. Match the size of the printed text — most forms use roughly 10 to 12 point — so your entries look typed by the form itself rather than stamped on afterwards. Keep a consistent left alignment down each column of fields; entries that start at different horizontal positions make an otherwise neat form look sloppy.

When an answer overflows its box, shrink the text one or two sizes instead of letting it spill past the border, but stay above about 8 point so it remains readable in print. For checkboxes, a typed "X" placed inside the box reads clearly at any size. Finish by reviewing the whole page at full-page scale: alignment that looks perfect at 200% zoom can drift visibly once the page is viewed as a whole.

If the form repeats your name, date, or reference number on every page, fill each occurrence carefully rather than assuming the reader will connect them. A form with "Jonh" on page three of four looks careless and can bounce back for correction. And if added text lands on top of printed words instead of beside them, the placement is off, not the tool — nudge the box clear of the printed text, because overlapping type that looks legible on a backlit screen turns into an unreadable smudge in print.

When text edits look wrong

Font mismatch is the most common complaint: the replacement word sits on the line but clearly isn't the same typeface as its neighbours. Editors substitute the closest available font, and an exact match is not always possible. Review every edited line at full-page scale before exporting. If the substitution is obvious, the honest fix is often to retype the whole line or paragraph in the substitute font so the passage is at least internally consistent.

If clicking a line does nothing — no outline, no cursor — the page is a scan: a picture of text with no characters to select. That is not a fault in the editor; it means the page needs optical character recognition before it can be edited. The guide on native PDF text vs OCR scans explains how to spot scan pages and when to run OCR, which the editor performs locally in English and French.

Two final checks. If text looks crisp on screen but wrong after export, open the downloaded file in a second viewer — the downloaded copy is the one other people will see, and export-time rendering can differ from the editing preview. If colour or weight looks off, adjust the offered text options (size, colour, weight) to match the surrounding words; a single mismatched word is usually a setting, not a defect.

Everyday scenarios: which approach fits

Most jobs fall into a handful of patterns. Match the pattern first and the tool choice becomes obvious — picking the wrong approach costs more time than the job itself, usually in the form of redoing a page that looked right until export.