Teaching and working remotely brings about new challenges many of us haven’t considered. Authorizing documents through your signature may seem complicated when you cannot sign a digital screen with your pen. Thankfully, there are many solutions to this issue. Note that this post only covers electronic signatures and not digital signatures. Digital signatures involve cryptographic certificates to verify and decrypt messages. Electronic signatures involve putting a hand-written signature onto a digital document.
Scan and sign
If you are in possession of a printer and a scanner, you can still sign documents the old fashioned way.
- Print the document that you wish to sign.
- Sign the printed document with a pen.
- Scan the signed printed document using your computer’s native scanning software.
- Send the scanned documents to the intended recipients.
If you are not in possession of a scanner and only a printer, you can also scan with various mobile apps. You might even open the file on your mobile device and use any annotation tool and your finger, a stylus or e-pencil to Sign, Save and Send.
Here are two examples of mobile apps (many others are available) that can turn your mobile device into a scanner:
You can also sign a blank piece of paper, scan it and use that as a signature for future documents. The following software-solutions will expand on that.
Adobe Acrobat Reader DC
The free version of Adobe Acrobat Reader DC offers the ability to sign documents.
- In the right-hand corner of the tool bar, find the Fill & Sign button.
- Click the Sign button on the top tool bar to begin your signature.
- Choose between typing your signature, drawing your signature or uploading a picture of your signature.
- This is where you can upload a scanned copy of your signature
- Save the document and send to the intended recipients.
macOS Preview
The native pdf viewer app (Preview) on macOS has a built-in tool to sign documents. Your Mac device will need to either have a trackpad or an iSight camera.
- Under the Edit button in the menu bar, show the Markup Toolbar (CMD + Shift + A)
- Click the signature button to begin creating your signature.
- Either choose to sign with your trackpad, or sign a piece of paper and hold it up to your camera with the iSight option.
- Save your document and send to the intended recipients.
Adobe Fill & Sign
On top of being a mobile scanning app as mentioned above, you can also use your touchscreen on your mobile device to sign documents. With this app you can either scan already signed documents or electronically sign scanned documents.
- Open the document you wish to sign with Adobe Fill & Sign.
- Tap on areas of the document you wish to write on.
- You can add text, check marks, lines, circles and of course, signatures.
- Save the document and send to your intended recipients.
You may wish to learn more about what qualifies as an electronic signature in Canada if you are signing legal documents.