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Comment by tombert | Hacker News Reader

I really hate dealing with my printer (or any printer for that matter), so I make pretty liberal use of my drawing tablet at this point. I import the PDF into Krita, use the ballpoint pen brush, and sign. I export to PNG, then use an imagemagick script to rotate it some random number between 1-3 degrees, and add noise onto it to look like a scan.

It's a pain, but it's still less annoying than dealing with a printer.

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I have a png of my signature, and I just paste it into the pdf, and submit that. Haven't run into a complaint yet, and I don't have to print anything.

Just a couple months ago I had a couple of forms rejected with a note “needs wet signature”

They were for a 401(k) plan I was updating RMD choices. I got the PDF form from their site, filled it out in Preview, pasted my signature PNG, and used an app on my phone to fax it(!) to their number.

Got rejected. Had to actually print the damn things and sign them with a pen, scan them again with my phone’s camera, and re-fax them.

Was mildly infuriating.

As an HR administrator for a small business, this absolutely grinds my gears. According to every accountant and consultant I've ever talked to, the "wet signature" rule is enshrined in federal law (although I have yet to be able to find out exactly where). It applies to all brokerage operations (opening your custodial accounts); employee applications (even internal to your own company that never leave your own filing cabinet - keep in case of audit!); statements of information (form 5500) filed with the IRS (it's the only form you can't submit electronically - needs a wet signature?!). For everything else we deal with a saved drop-in signature in Acrobat works just fine. Almost not worth the employee's savings given their low participation rate and general ambivalence to the whole program.

Not sure if it's new, but I just recently filed a 5500 online. You can do it here: https://www.efast.dol.gov/welcome.html

But yes, dealing with brokerage forms that needed a wet signature faxed..

My mistake on the 5500 - we have a consultant / tax preparer that files the actual form for us, so it does look like the actual filing is electronic. What I was incorrectly remembering, it turns out, was that the authorization form for our consultant to electronically file needed a wet signature.

I printed, signed, scanned, and emailed Ameritrade. My scan was so good that it got rejected. They told me that digital signature is not accepted.

This has happened to me in the past. Now I always make sure to damage the paper and avoid putting it in the scanner straight. Bend a corner, wrinkle it a little, and select the image mode on the scanner to avoid the background looking too clean.

Add some fake coffee mug stains and lens flare :D

http://legacy.hanno-rein.de/hanno-rein.de/archives/349

For Latex documents, but same concept and a fun little add on.

Do you think it might have worked if you had run it through this FalsiScan program?

Yes, I bet it would have, and I wish I had heard about it then!

When I refaxed the forms, I just removed the PNG signatures from the PDFs first (leaving all other form fields typed in), printed them, signed them, made sure the two signatures were different in obvious ways (but still the "same"!), and scanned them at deliberately low resolution.

This program sounds like it automates all those steps.

Vanguard?

They're ridiculous with this. It's a huge pain with trusts.

SavingsPlus. They handle California's retirement programs.

How wet ? You could add a "splash" effect on top of the signature

Maybe a coffee cup ring?

I should probably do that. I've always hesitated because the paranoid part of me thinks they'll catch on to it being digital if I have to sign in ten different places and they see that the signature is literally identical for each one. My Krita solution, while annoying, allows for me to have a slightly different signature for each one, for each form I sign, allowing it to pass all but the most judicious level of forensics.

Granted, no one is going CSI on anything I sign. I should probably just make like ten pngs of my signature and paste those in.

I have three different signatures and a several versions of my initials loaded into Preview.app for use in signing PDFs because I don't want them all to look the same.

Preview is a killer app and it gets me though all sorts of situations., document signing (and doctoring), and PDF manipulation first and foremost.

Combined with notes.app which has some very nice features (document scan, share, to-do lists, reliable sync, adding of files, search etc) it is Apple at its best.

I do the same. I just have one saved. No one has ever complained, even when it's blatantly obvious that I didn't sign it by hand.

I figure even if they do complain, it doesn't matter. Its not like I don't have permission to do what I want with my own signature. The worst might be that they come back and say "sign it properly please" and then I have to go through the effort of printing it out and scanning it back in.

When we were buying a house back in 2009 (before electronic document signatures, which are the most amazing thing ever compared with the old way) we had to sign zillions of different pieces of paperwork going back and forth while making offers and so on. I was doing most of this during the day from the office, and all the paperwork had to be signed by both me and my wife.

So what I'd do was take the PDF, paste in my wife's signature, print it out, sign it myself, then fax it over. Never had any problems.

It depends on what you're signing. My letters of authorization to my bank require a "wet signature." Scanned or photographed and emailed is fine, but they want you to print and sign, and they've sent it back to me when they can tell I've used a digital stamp.

This product looks interesting, although the idea of me entering coordinates for the stamp instead of just stamping it in a GUI is not at all appealing...

I did my refi using that method till they realized i was using a digitized copy and sent over a person to collect wet signatures from me.

This, but with extra noise around the signature and with at least 4 unique copies, max number of times one has to sign full name a document (in my personal xp). Whomever is going to read it and check for digital, will probably check closer on the signed pages. Also make sure the signature isn't too perfect and not too regular on the ink :)

Ditto. I've been doing it 11 years at this point and it's never come back to bite me.

Ditto, had it only once that they complained the signature on separate documents was identical. Well, just wrote it down a couple more times in case I run into that again.

I do the same

There's also this website which I've used successfully with many bureaucracies.

https://www.scanyourpdf.com/

I've seen this one, I think it was on HN about a year ago, but a lot of the forms I've been signing in the last year have been stuff containing a fair amount of personal information (e.g. wife's immigration stuff, refinancing a house, banking annoyances, etc.). I can't really audit the code for an online service, and I find it unlikely that either Krita or ImageMagick are sending this information externally, considering both seem to work fine even without an internet connection.

EDIT: Clicking on it, I see the source code is available. If I can run it on my local box then this might be a little less nasty than mucking with the `convert` command.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23157408

Github repo: https://github.com/baicunko/scanyourpdf

But yeah, the security implications of uploading a PDF with your SSN and signature to a random website is, um, not good.

I'm not too enthusiastic about uploading personal information and a signature to a random website.

Years ago I user a good blue Ball pen and signed in a blank paper. I scanned this in high resolution, cropped, fattened the lines, removed background and saved it as a transparent PNG. I added this PNG as a stamp to my favourite PDF software and have signed many many documents. The thing to remember is to flatten comments after I stamped my signature onto the document.

You can actually sign a PDF this way just using Preview on MacOS.

I've signed and returned almost everything requiring a signature for years this way, you can even have multiple signatures (helpful when you need spouse to sign something too...) in Preview to speed up dealing with these kind of tasks. I've never once been asked to sign it with a pen instead, even for relatively complex transactions like houses/cars.

Because Preview lets you draw the signature using the TrackPad and a finger, I've had no difficulty making a very convincing replica of my actual signature in Preview.

While the linked tool may "look" more convincing with fake photocopy marks etc, for just signatures its not been necessary to go beyond Preview for me ever. In the US so much business is conducted on paperfree platforms like DocuSign etc that I don't think many people even notice the fact the signature is digital anymore, given platforms like DocuSign do more or less the same thing.

I had passport photos rejected due to my eyes being too shaded or something. One eye seemed a little darker according to the error messages. I tried taking new photos, including ones from I paid for (done at a pharamacy) and still failed.

In Preview I copied one eye and put it over my troubled eye, reversed. It worked.

I’ve been though face detection systems in various countries (US, UK, France) and I seem to get through ok.

I knew that, and I do run macOS, but the signature always looks "digital" to me. It's not bad, but with Krita and it's pen or pencil brushes, in combination with a decent drawing tablet (well, as decent as a Huion screen tablet is) with a pressure-sensitive pen, I can get something that looks outright indistinguishable to a physical signature.

Dare telling which exactly config for brushes do you use?

Nothing too crazy. There’s a built in ballpoint pen brush that I think looks pretty good. My tablet is pressure sensitive so it allows for the slightly uneven ink density that you get with cheap ballpoints.

Also iOS

I use Figma quite a bit for this. Just make my signature a component and drop it in where I need it.

Used to use Photoshop where I just made my signature a custom brush.

Disclaimer: I work for Figma.

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