Is a drawn signature on a PDF legally binding?

In most jurisdictions an electronic signature is valid for ordinary contracts, provided it shows intent and can be attributed to you. Certain categories — wills, some property transfers, some notarised documents — are carved out and still require wet ink. Check the category before assuming.

How do I sign a PDF that is password protected?

Unlock it first with the password you were given, sign it, then re-protect it if it needs to stay locked. A permissions password that blocks editing has to be removed before any tool can write to the page.

Can the recipient tell I did not print it?

Yes, and it works in your favour. A flattened electronic signature on a clean document looks deliberate; a crooked scan with a grey background looks like a document that has been through a photocopier twice.

Do I have to upload my contract to sign it?

Not here. The PDF is opened by the browser on your own machine, the signature is drawn onto the page there, and the result is written back out locally. Nothing about signing requires a server, and for a contract that is the point.

how to sign a pdf for free

How to Sign a PDF Without Printing It

Three quite different things get called "signing a PDF", and picking the wrong one either wastes an afternoon or gives you something that will not hold up.

Three things called signing

Almost every argument about signing PDFs comes from people meaning different things by the word.

A drawn signature: An image of your handwriting placed on the page. This is what the overwhelming majority of requests mean, and what most contracts, forms and letters need.
A certificate-based digital signature: Cryptographic. It binds the document to a certificate issued to you and breaks visibly if a single byte changes afterwards. Needed for tenders, filings and regulated submissions.
An e-signature service: A workflow around the signature: identity checks, an audit trail, timestamps, countersigning. What you buy is the evidence, not the mark on the page.

Why print, sign and scan is the worst option

It is the most common method and it degrades the document in three ways at once. A PDF that was real text — searchable, selectable, small — comes back as photographs of paper. The file size typically grows by a factor of ten or more. And the scan carries whatever your printer, your pen and your lighting contributed, which is rarely flattering.

It is also the slowest. Placing a signature image on the page takes about thirty seconds and produces a better document than the printer-scanner round trip does in ten minutes.

Getting a good signature image

If you are drawing with a finger or a stylus, draw it larger than you think and let the tool scale it down — a signature drawn small looks wobbly at any size, and one drawn large looks steady when shrunk.

If you are photographing one from paper, the details matter. Sign on unlined white paper with a black pen — a thick one, since fine ballpoint lines break up under compression. Photograph it in good indirect light. Then crop tight to the ink, so the file is spending its bytes on the signature rather than on the table.

One signature done properly is reusable indefinitely, which makes the five minutes worth spending once.

Black pen, thick nib: Blue scans grey and thin lines disappear when the image is compressed.
Crop to the ink: Everything outside the signature is file size doing nothing.
Keep it transparent: A PNG with a transparent background sits on the page cleanly. A JPEG brings a white box with it, which will cover whatever it lands on.
Flatten when you are done: Until you flatten, the signature is a movable annotation layer that a recipient can drag off the page or delete.

Flatten, then send

This is the step people skip. A signature placed as an annotation is a separate object floating above the page — most PDF readers will happily let anyone select it, move it, or lift it out into another document. Flattening merges it into the page itself, so what you send is a single fixed image of the finished document.

Flattening also fixes a compatibility problem: annotation layers render differently across readers, and some print without them entirely. A flattened signature looks the same everywhere and prints every time.

When you genuinely need a certificate

If a tax portal, a tender submission or a regulator is asking for a digital signature, they mean the cryptographic kind, and a drawn image will be rejected. In India that is a Digital Signature Certificate on a USB token; in the EU it is a qualified certificate under eIDAS. Both are issued by an approved certifying authority after identity verification, and both are applied using the software that comes with the token or certificate, not with a general-purpose PDF tool.

The plain test: if the requirement names an issuing authority, a token, or a certificate class, you need the certificate route. If it just says "signed", a drawn signature is what is being asked for.