I have written about ways to electronically put your signature on a PDF quite a few times (for example, or ), but they have all been on the Mac. Today it is Windows’ turn. The latest version of has added the ability to drop your signature into a PDF.
Previously, you needed the rather-expensive 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. Acrobat Click Sign If you don’t have a Sign button, you are probably using an older version of Reader. Head on over to 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. Acrobat 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 on my iPhone to take a picture and then transferred it to my Windows machine.
On adobe reader. Open the document in which you need to place the signature. This Wikihow material shows how one can easily place signature on adobe reader. Now take 'View' and then click 'Sign' from the drop down box.
Once you have your signature file on your computer, select it and hit Accept Choose Signature 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. Resize Signature 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. Finalize Changes 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, 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.