How to quickly sign digital documents

03.05.2011
For a variety of reasons—frugality, environmentalism, laziness—I try to avoid printing documents whenever possible. That can get tricky when someone needs my signature. For example, I recently joined Macworld as a full-time staffer and was immediately sent a massive 80-plus page PDF welcome packet. Buried within those 80-plus pages were eight forms that I had to fill out and return to HR. That meant pulling individual pages out of a single PDF, then digitally filling them in.

You probably know how to in Preview; separating pages is just as easy. To start, make sure the sidebar is showing (Command-Shift-D if not) and that it's displaying thumbnails of the pages in the document (if not, Command-Option-2). To pull a page out of the PDF, open it in Preview, click on the appropriate thumbnail in the sidebar, and drag it to your desktop. Preview will create a new file with just that page, giving it the same name as the original file with (dragged) as a suffix. If you Command-click to select multiple (even non-contiguous) pages from the sidebar and drag them all to the desktop, you'll create a single new PDF containing all of those pages.

Once I'd extracted the forms from the surrounding document, there were several ways I could add my signature to them; for example, we've written before about into a PDF. I prefer another way: I create a custom font in which one of the characters is actually my signature.

To create that font, I like the $7 from developer Elji Nishidal: It lets me use the iPad's touch screen to "write" letters in my handwriting, then combines those letters in a TTF font file. The trick I use to save my signature: Instead of drawing the caret character (^) in iFontMaker, I scrawl my John Hancock. Once I've installed my handwriting font on my Mac, I can type Shift-6 (the key combo for the caret) to insert that signature.

To do so in a PDF form, I use or the free alternative . Both apps let me add text to an existing PDF and place it properly. More importantly, they let me select that text's font and font size. So I open the PDF form in PDFpen or FormulatePro, select my handwriting font, and type Shift-6: my signature is inserted. I then use the apps' text-placement tools to place and size it correctly. While I'm at it, I fill in other fields in the forms by "hand." Both apps let me save my completed PDF (still in PDF format), which I can then submit.