[Macworld]

Post your comments for Sign your PDFs electronically using Preview here

[CLS9]

Does this only work in Lion? If so, it would be a good idea to mention that. I'm still running Snow Leopard, as many other Mac users have to, and my Preview application looks and acts nothing like this. I use PDFPen to insert my signature into PDF documents.

[thubsch]

@CLS9: Yes, it works in Lion.

@Dan Frakes: Is there any way to make the signatures appear in colored ink? (Although I've used blue ink in my signature, Preview digitizes it as black ink.)

[bbhbbh]

Great tip. Years ago I paid for a PostScript (I think...) file to do just this. Of course, over the course of several OS upgrades it stopped working.

[Dan Frakes]

CLS9, on 21 June 2012 - 07:45 AM, said:

Does this only work in Lion?

Yes, I believe the feature debuted in Lion.

[Dan Frakes]

thubsch, on 21 June 2012 - 07:53 AM, said:

Is there any way to make the signatures appear in colored ink? (Although I've used blue ink in my signature, Preview digitizes it as black ink.)

Unfortunately, not that I'm aware of.

[TeaEarleGreyHot]

CLS9, on 21 June 2012 - 07:45 AM, said:

Does this only work in Lion? If so, it would be a good idea to mention that. I'm still running Snow Leopard, as many other Mac users have to, and my Preview application looks and acts nothing like this. I use PDFPen to insert my signature into PDF documents.

Unfortunately, as a Snow Leopard user, this is not available to me. My current method is to (1) sign paper (2) scan sig (3) open sig in Deneba Canvas--sadly discontinued by new ownership (4) crop sig (5) use magic wand to select all pixels of a signature with a color tolerance of 150 (6) copy/paste sig--which is now on a transparent background (7) save as TIFF--which supports transparency (8) drag or copy/paste tiff sig into document requiring it. Yes, it's a kludge, but works. And once I have the tiff sig, it's reusable, of course. Also, I always use blue ink to sign, so the b&w method of Lion isn't ideal for me anyway.

This post has been edited by TeaEarleGreyHot: 21 June 2012 - 08:33 AM

[MorrisTheCat]

I learned this a few months ago from an Apple engineer I work with. It was just in time and perfect for tax time.No need to print, sign and fax back any forms to my accountant. It works really well and stores your sig for future use, so its a one time process, per Mac I assume.

[TeaEarleGreyHot]

TeaEarleGreyHot, on 21 June 2012 - 08:31 AM, said:

Unfortunately, as a Snow Leopard user, this is not available to me. My current method is to....

Thanks to this article, I started experimenting... I found I can use a color felt tip marker to sign a white paper, take a picture of it using photo booth, open the photo in Preview, crop it, then use the "instant alpha" function of Preview to select the background and delete it to make transparent (or if the letters are contiguous, then select the color sig to copy it out of the background) and save it as a png or pdf or tiff. This can now be pasted into jpg files using preview. It was all pretty straightforward. I have not yet found a way to paste it into PDF documents... any suggestions?

The advantage here is that it provides a color signature. I don't have Lion, so I don't know if it can be used by the "signature" function of Lion's Preview, but it might be.

This post has been edited by TeaEarleGreyHot: 21 June 2012 - 09:03 AM

[barrnet]

"I have not yet found a way to paste it into PDF documents... any suggestions?"
I'm also using Snow Leopard, but in Adobe Reader 10.1.3, open a pdf and under the "Sign" menu, select "I need to sign," then "Place Signature." A new window opens with 3 choices to Type (3 script fonts), Draw or Use an Image. Select one and then place and re-scale if necessary. Free and works.

[craydale]

This is very convenient - do it once and the average school kid can extract your signature from the resultant document and henceforth sign any document on your behalf, whether you ask them to or not... Now where are you sending that PDF?

[kosh]

Not every Mac has a built in camera. I can't believe Preview does not have the option of importing a signature from a scanner or an image file.

[markCH57]

THANK YOU!

[MmnW]

While this is a nice feature, I have to points that bother me.
First, how secure is that? If I sign a PDF and send it as an E-Mail. Can't the recipient extract the signature from the document and forge other documents? I've extracted images in perfect quality from PDF's with Illustrator in the past. So, I'm really worried about that.
Second, this only works if no one requests a hardcopy. I recently ran into several cases, where recipients requested a signed document per E-Mail or Fax (yes, people still use fax). But then insisted on mailing the signed document via snail mail afterwards.