PDF Filler & Signer

For most everyday agreements in the US (E-SIGN Act) and many other jurisdictions, electronic signatures — including a drawn image placed with intent to sign — are broadly recognized, and this is exactly what apps like Adobe Fill & Sign produce. Certain transactions (wills, some real estate and court filings) have stricter requirements, and audit-trailed services exist for counterparties who demand them. When stakes are high, confirm what the receiving party accepts.

Those are workflow services: they route documents between parties, verify signer identity, and keep a tamper-evident audit trail — and your document lives on their servers to do it. This tool covers the other 90% of signing life: a form arrives, you sign it, you send it back. No account, no upload, no per-document limits, and nothing retained anywhere because there's no server involved.

This tool places text anywhere on any PDF — which works on both real fillable forms and the far more common 'flat' forms that are just a scan of paper. The text you add is positioned visually rather than entered into the form's field structure, so it prints and reads identically; the trade-off is that software reading form data programmatically won't see it as field values.

Some PDFs carry encryption or permission flags that restrict modification, which pdf-lib respects. The universal workaround: open the PDF in any viewer and print it to a new PDF (Save as PDF destination) — the copy is a plain, unrestricted document that signs fine. Password-protected files need their password entered and a copy saved first.