Sign PDF Documents Without Printing and Scanning Them From Any Device

Sign PDF Documents Without Printing and Scanning Them From Any Device

Need to sign a document and email it? Don’t print, sign, and then scan it back in again. Skip the entire process and apply your signature electronically. It saves time and you don’t need a printer or scanner.

All the below tools also let you type words into a document, so you can fill out forms without printing them first. This even works if the form isn’t “fillable” — type words and position them in a place that looks correct.

Windows

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Adobe Reader does a great job of this on Windows. You can sign a piece of paper and hold it up to your laptop’s webcam. Adobe Reader will capture that signature and turn it into a digital image, allowing you to easily apply it to PDF documents in the future. You only need to capture your signature in this way once — every future document you sign is just a matter of a few clicks. This happens entirely on your computer; you don’t need to use any of Adobe’s cloud services.

Mac

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The Preview application included with Mac OS X has integrated document-signing features. Thanks to the excellent trackpads integrated into MacBooks, you can actually draw your signature on the trackpad with one of your fingers to enter it into Preview. On a new MacBook with a “Force Touch” trackpad, this is even pressure sensitive, allowing for even more accurate signatures.

You could also just sign a piece of paper and scan it in with your webcam, if you prefer creating your signature the old-fashioned way

iPhone & iPad

You’ll need a third-party app for this on your iPhone or iPad. There are many different apps for electronically signing PDFs on the app store, including Adobe’s own Adobe Acrobat DC app (formerly Adobe Reader). It works similar to how it does on the desktop.

Just long-press somewhere in a PDF document in the app, select Signature, and draw your signature. You don’t have to sign up for Adobe’s “Document Cloud” or pay for anything like that to use this feature — it’ll just work with any PDF.

Other apps like CudaSign, SignEasy, and HelloSign are also available. However, these generally require a per-signature payment or a monthly fee. The signature feature in the Adobe Acrobat DC app is completely free.

Android

Android also offers a variety of third-party apps that can electronically sign documents. As on an iPhone or iPad, you’ll probably just want to install the Adobe Acrobat DC app (formerly Adobe Reader), which has this feature built-in.

The app works just like on iOS — open a PDF, long-press somewhere, and tap Signature to add a signature. You can draw the signature on your screen with a finger.

You’ll find fancier signature apps like DocuSign and SignEasy on Google Play for Android, too. Like on an iPhone or iPad, these apps generally want you to pay on an ongoing basis for the privilege of signing documents. Just use Adobe’s app instead.

Chromebook

Chromebooks rely on web-based software, so you’ll need to use one of the fancier web-based services for this. HelloSign works quite well for this — so well that we recommended it even to Windows users who didn’t feel like using Adobe Reader. It’s a slick application. It also provides integration with Google Docs and Gmail — there’s a good chance you’re already using these services and might appreciate this as a Chromebook user.

The only downside is the price. The free version of HelloSign limits you to three signatures per month, and you’ll have to pay extra if you want to go above that. Still, if you only need to sign the occasional document a few times a month at most, HelloSign will be completely free for you, so it’s a good option.

Linux

This is a bit tougher on Linux, as the official version of Adobe Reader for Linux was discontinued. Even the old, out-of-date versions available for Linux don’t have this functionality, nor do popular integrated PDF viewers like Evince and Okular.

The best way to do this is probably to use Xournal. This tool can annotate PDFs, adding images to them. First, you’ll need to create an image of your signature — sign a piece of paper, scan it into your Linux system, and clean it up. You could potentially just capture a photo of it with your webcam or smartphone’s camera, too. You may want to tweak it in the GIMP so it has a transparent background, or just make sure you sign a white piece of paper and that the background is entirely white.

Install Xournal from your Linux distribution’s software-installation tool, open the PDF, and click the Tools > Image menu option. This will let you insert the image of your signature, and you can reposition and resize it as necessary so it fits in the signature field.

Having to actually scan and create an image file is a little bit annoying, but you can use this method to quickly sign documents in the future after you’ve gotten a good image of your signature.

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You probably regularly sign screens when paying for things with your credit card. Thanks to Square and similar services, there’s also a good chance you’ve signed a smartphone or tablet screen with your finger while paying for something. The next time you need to sign a document, you can sign it electronically in the same way.

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How to Test Your Internet Connection Speed or Cellular Data Speed

How to Test Your Internet Connection Speed or Cellular Data Speed

How fast is your Internet connection? Sure, your Internet service provider has given you some numbers, and your cellular provider probably says you get blazing fast 4G LTE. But how fast is it, actually?

There’s a good chance you’re not getting the Internet connection speed you’re paying for, but maybe you are. Here’s how to find out.

What This Does

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You can’t just rely on the download speeds you see when downloading files and doing other normal things. Download speeds you’ll see depend on a lot of things, including the remote server and the number of “hops” (Internet routers) in between you and the server. It may not even just be the Internet infrastructure itself — the remote server may only want to give you so much download bandwidth, or it may be bogged down.

Instead, you’ll need to test this a bit more scientifically. The ideal would be to find a server nearby you, one that has a large amount of bandwidth available. You could then try to download from it and upload to it, seeing just how high your download and upload speeds could reach. This ensures you’d just be measuring the last-mile connection speed between you and your ISP as accurately as possible.

That’s why you need dedicated tools for measuring your connection speed.

Best Practices For Connection Speed Testing

If you want to get the most accurate result possible, you can’t just run the tool once without thinking about it. Here’s what you really need to do:

Ensure You Aren’t Using Your Internet Connection: Is someone else streaming Netflix in the other room, or are you downloading files via BitTorrent on your computer? Pause all these applications using your connection before performing a speed-test. Ensure the speed-test application is the only thing using your connection, and you’ll be able to measure it more accurately. If the tool can’t saturate your connection, the numbers you’ll see will be low.

On a smartphone or any other type of mobile data connection, just ensure your device isn’t downloading or uploading data in the background.

Measure More Than Once: A single measurement isn’t the be-all, end-all of connection speeds. Measure more than once, preferably at different times during the day. For example, you may have faster Internet connection speeds during the middle of the night when everyone is sleeping and slower connection speeds in the evening when your neighbors are home from work and using their home Internet connections.

On a smartphone or any other type of mobile data connection, your speed will depend on how many people around you are using data, as well as the signal quality in your area, and other factors. Move around between speed-tests and you can see how your connection speed varies between different locations. As with a wired Internet connection, the time of day can affect things — you’ll probably have a slower connection speed at lunch time in the central business district than you will if you tried the speed test ta the same location on Sunday when no one else is around.

How to Test Your Connection Speed

The actual process of measuring your connection speed is simple. The gold standard for this isSpeedtest.net, and that’s the one we recommend you use. A quick web search reveals many other tools, with even Comcast and AT&T offering their own speed-test applications. Using it on your computer is as simple as visiting the website and clicking the “Begin Test” button.

On a smartphone or tablet, free Speedtest.net applications are available. Download them from your app store of choice, launch them, and test your speed. Remember, if your smartphone is connected to a Wi-Fi network, the app will test the speed of the WI-Fi network. Disconnect from the Wi-Fi network and it will test your smartphone’s data network.

Warning: Using any sort of speed-test app involves both downloading and uploading some data. If you have a limited amount of mobile data, this will count toward your cap. The app works by attempting to download and upload data at maximum speed for several seconds, maxing out your connection. It could use as much as 20 MB of data per speed test, or even more — the faster your connection, the more data it will use. Take this into account.

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Yes, there are other speed-testing websites and apps out there. But they all work in a similar way — they provide very fast, nearby servers that attempt to max out your connection. Under these ideal conditions, they can provide you with a reasonably accurate estimate of just how fast your connection is when it comes to both uploading and downloading.

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