How to Electronically Sign Documents Without Printing and Scanning Them
You are emailed a document and you have to sign it and send it back. You could print out the document, sign it, and then scan it back in and email it. But there’s a better, faster way.
We’ll show you how to quickly add your signature to any PDF document, saving it as a standard PDF file that can be ready anywhere. We won’t be covering digital signatures that few people know how to read.
Electronic Signatures, Not Digital Signatures
Digital signatures are something else entirely. A digital signature is cryptographically secure and verifies that someone with your private signing key (in other words, you) has seen the document and authorized it.
A digital signature is way more secure than a traditional ink signature or a signature image overlaid on top of a PDF document. But we won’t be using those here.
Why? The answer is simple — most people are expecting a document with a little scribble of ink on it. Send them a PDF file with a digital signature and they won’t know what to make of it. For many businesses, simply accepting signed documents by email rather than forcing you to fax them is a huge technological leap.
So sure, the below methods aren’t perfectly secure — but neither is printing something, scribbling over it with a pen, and then scanning it again. At least this is faster!
Instead of digital signatures, we’ll be using electronic signatures. They are just like traditional ink signatures, but applied electronically to documents without any printing or scanning required.
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