Printing a PDF form, filling it in by hand, signing it, and scanning it back in is still depressingly common — and entirely unnecessary for most forms.

Two different situations, one tool

If the PDF has real fillable form fields (the kind where clicking a blank line shows a text cursor, common in official government or HR forms), Fill & Sign detects them automatically and shows editable boxes right on the page — type your answers directly, no printing involved. It picks up text fields and checkboxes this way. Radio buttons and dropdown/choice fields aren’t auto-detected yet — if a form uses those, treat it as the second situation below and place a text stamp or checkmark over the option you mean instead.

If the PDF is just a scanned or flat document with no real form fields (a lot of contracts and older forms are like this), you can still add your signature and any typed text as an overlay on top of the page. Draw your signature with a mouse, trackpad, or finger on a touchscreen, or just type your name in a signature-style font if drawing isn’t practical. You can also upload a photo of your actual signature (or a company stamp) and it gets placed the same way.

Either way, there’s no date-field autofill — if a form asks for today’s date, type it in like any other answer.

Placing your signature

Once you’ve drawn or typed a signature, it drops onto the page automatically — drag it to reposition, or drag the small handle on its corner to resize it. No fiddling with a click-to-place flow that never lands exactly where you meant it to.

Signing more than one spot, or a multi-page document

Each pass through the tool places one signature (or stamp) at one spot on one page, plus whatever form fields you filled in anywhere in the document. If you need your signature on more than one page — an initial on page 2 and a full signature on page 5, say — download the file after the first placement, then feed that downloaded PDF back into the tool and place the second one. It’s an extra round trip, not a single continuous flow, but each pass is quick and nothing gets lost between them since every field and signature already placed is baked into the file you re-upload.

This also isn’t built for collecting a signature from someone else — there’s no email link to send a form out for a third party to fill in and sign remotely. It’s for completing and signing your own copy, on your own device.

For the overwhelming majority of everyday documents — internal approvals, informal agreements, forms that just need a signature rather than a notarized one — a typed or drawn signature is perfectly normal and widely accepted. In the US, the ESIGN Act and UETA are what make an electronic signature enforceable in the first place, as long as both sides intended to sign electronically; the EU and UK have similar ground rules under eIDAS. None of that requires any particular software — a drawn or typed name that you intended as your signature generally qualifies.

For anything with real legal weight (property transactions, certain contracts, notarized documents), check what your specific document or jurisdiction requires; some situations call for a qualified e-signature service or a wet-ink signature regardless of how convenient a digital one is. It’s also worth knowing that a drawn or typed signature like this is a visual mark, not cryptographic proof — it doesn’t detect if someone edits the PDF afterward. If you need the file itself to prove it hasn’t been tampered with since you signed it, that’s a different tool: see Digital Signatures vs. a Picture of Your Signature and Digitally Sign PDF.

Where your file actually goes

Nothing here gets uploaded to a server to be filled in or signed. Fill & Sign runs in your browser tab — the PDF is read, the fields are filled, and the signature is stamped on, all on your own device, and the file only leaves your computer when you hit download. There’s no “files deleted after an hour” policy to trust, because there’s no server-side copy to delete in the first place.

Once you’re done, download the completed PDF — the fields you filled in (or the signature you placed) are baked into the file, ready to send.