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Comment by AnIdiotOnTheNet | Hacker News Reader

I once wrote my signature on a piece of white paper and scanned it in. Then used paint.net to delete the white parts and save it as a transparent PNG.

Now I just paste that over the appropriate place on electronic documents and email it back.

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PSA: For those on macOS, the Preview app has taken this exact concept and built it in for a while now, and I use it all the time. Clicking and dragging on my signature has saved me countless times.

I did that once while sitting in my car all right on my phone.

I was about to go in to something I couldn't blow off, and I couldn't blow off returning the mail as soon as possible either.

But I had a Note 4 phone and a working cell connection and managed to get it all done in a few minutes right there in my drivers seat.

I think I didn't even end up using the Note4's stylus but writing the signature on paper and taking a pic.

It was a while ago so I don't remeber exactly what I did or what apps I used. I probably tried a few different things on the spot before I found something that worked. Maybe the official adobe android app had signature support like the desktop app does now, or maybe I had to do it more manually with some other combination of apps, but I know that I went from receiving an email with a pdf attachment to returning that email with my own new pdf attachment all in about 15 minutes with nothing but my phone.

I did the same years ago. I've done everything from new job paperwork to buying a house to various government forms and I've yet to have anyone refuse to accept or even comment on the fact that my signature is a pixel-perfect copy on all documents.

Somehow I am always surprised when I use a new PDF tool and discover that it, like all the others, has failed to use transparency to make signatures look right. No real signature fails to cross something already on a document, but every time we get this stupid blank box around the signature...

I find this rather amusing, because the much maligned Adobe Reader handles this just fine.

I've been using a little app called Xournal on linux for years which does that just fine.

I have a 600dpi png file with black foreground and transparent background.

Xournal drops it anywhere right over the existing pdf image, resized and positioned at will, and the transparent parts are transparent.

Clearly I've been using the wrong tools... fortunately this isn't an extremely common task for me.

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