How did you get the document in the first place? Would it be possible to just leave it on the computer and sign it electronically, with no printing needed?
You fancy Windows 10 people. I should have mentioned that I’m stuck in the land of Windows 7 & 8.1.
Oh, I’d trade a PDF printer for Windows 7 any day. I hate 10. I just don’t want to deal with the upgrade nags…
It was emailed to me as a three page pdf. I printed it, filled in some details and signed it. They wanted it back as a pdf. My scanner produced three separate jpeg file. There were a couple other output formats, but not pdf. Taking the suggestion above to print to pdf, I produced three pdf files. Then I was able to put them together (using Latex) into one three page document that I was able to email back.
It is certainly possible to doodle directly on a PDF document, but one would need one of those electronic-stylus tablets or to do it using the mouse. Lacking that, one could scan a written signature and paste that onto the PDF.
Which brings me to my hijack: how can an electronic image of a signature be considered official? It is trivial to duplicate. A physical piece of paper signed with indelible blue-black ink presents at least some small barrier to forgery.
In Preview, on a Mac, there’s a nice little feature for signing PDFs without printing them. You sign a random piece of paper and hold it up to the computer’s camera, and it takes a picture of it and stores it. From then on, you can sign anything with just a few clicks to insert that picture onto a line. This is far superior to printing and re-scanning, because the text is still text (which can be searched and so on, and which takes up only a very small amount of space).
I’d be surprised if there wasn’t a tool for this on PC, too, but I don’t know what it is.
If you’re on Windows 10 you should be able to print just about anything to PDF.
You are of course wise not to trust random Google search results regarding downloadable software. But I usually do my searches for free software at Download.com, which is owned by CNet, or at least affiliated with them. I’ve never had a problem with software I’ve downloaded from them.
For a lot of pdf work, there are websites that let you upload and work on them without downloading files. With the caveat that I wouldn’t upload anything sensitive.
A long time ago they were trustworthy, but they’ve been caught secretly installing adware onto unsuspecting users’ computers:
As of 2016 they’ve supposedly stopped the practice, but who knows what other nefarious crap they’re willing to try? Fool me once…