Signature maker

Almost every document that needs a signature arrives digitally and has to leave digitally, and the usual route is absurd: print it, sign it, photograph it, crop it, and end up with a grey rectangle of kitchen table around your name. A transparent PNG drops onto a page and looks like it was signed there.

Transparency is the entire point. A signature saved as JPEG carries a white box with it, which covers whatever it lands on — a line, a border, the text underneath. PNG keeps the background empty, so only the ink shows. That is also why this tool cannot output JPEG: the format has no way to store "nothing here".

The image is cropped to the drawn pixels rather than the box you drew in. It sounds trivial and it is the difference between something you can place and something you have to crop in another program first — a signature floating in six hundred pixels of empty space will not sit where you put it in Word or a PDF editor.

A finger on a phone gives a rounder, larger signature than a mouse; a trackpad tends to give a shaky one. If it does not look like you, the thickness slider usually matters more than the drawing does — most people's pen is thinner than the default on screen.

Worth being clear about what this is and is not. It is a picture of your signature, exactly like a scanned one, and it carries the same weight as ink on paper — which is to say, it depends on the document and the jurisdiction, and it is not a cryptographic digital signature. It also means treating the file with the same care: a transparent PNG of your signature is trivially reusable by anyone who has it. This one is generated on your own machine and never sent anywhere, which is the reason to make it here rather than upload a scan to a website.