How To Create a Digital Signature in PDF

Digital signatures are becoming increasingly more common in the business world and, in many cases, are required. Creating a digital signature for PDF documents is an easy way to safeguard and authenticate your documents. A digital signature used instead of printed text indicates that you have personally authorized the material. It only takes a few minutes to create a PDF digital signature, which can be saved and reused whenever a document needs to be signed.

Difficulty: Moderate

Instructions

Things You'll Need:

• Scanner Photo editing software

1. Write your signature using a black pen on a neutral colored background. The best background would be a piece of clear plastic like a transparency sheet. If clear plastic is unavailable, choose a piece of plain unlined white paper. Any background color behind the signature will be seen and may interfere with the appearance of the PDF document.

2. Scan the image at 300 DPI using the black and white text setting. Save the image as a bitmap using a .GIF, .JPEG or .TIFF extension.

3. Convert the image to a vector file using a photo-editing program, such as Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator. Open the image file in the program, click "File," choose "Save As" and save it as a vector file. Once the image has been converted to a vector file, it can be reopened and edited.

4. Trace over the signature using the drawing tool in the software you used for the conversion to darken lines and repair any flaws in the signature's appearance.

5. Save the signature as a PDF file when you have finished editing the signature. Click "File," choose "Save As" and pick "PDF." Click "OK" to close the signature file.

Tips & Warnings

• A bitmap is an image file that stores the image information as pixels. A vector is a file that saves the image information as a mathematical equation. PDF documents are vector files, so creating the digital signature as a vector allows you to easily merge the signature into PDF documents. Create company logos for your PDF documents using these same steps.

Resources

• Adobe Photoshop Free Trial
• Adobe Illustrator Free Trial

[mwak]

on 7/30/2009 This article is not talking about how to create digital signature rather, how an image be created to be used in a digital signature. For information about how to create digital signatures in PDF see following ehow articles:

http://www.ehow.com/how_5221043_digital-pdf-using-pdf-signseal.html

http://www.ehow.com/how_5052686_create-pdf-signature-space.html