Are handwritten signatures legal?

In most of Europe and North America a signature drawn on an electronic document is a valid electronic signature for everyday agreements, and it is treated as evidence of intent rather than as a special legal object.

Getting the mark off the paper

Write on unlined white paper with a dark pen, photograph it straight down in daylight, and let the background be as bright as possible. Are handwritten signatures legal? start here: everything the software can do later depends on this one clean capture.

What is usually decisive is not the drawing but the context around it: who sent the document, when it was accepted, from which address, and whether the text changed afterwards. That record is what a dispute actually examines.

Placing it on the document

The finished signature should be a transparent image, cropped close, sized to the signature line rather than to the page. A white rectangle around it is the single most common giveaway that a signature was pasted in.

A small set of documents still ask for more — some property, inheritance and family-law paperwork, depending on the country. When a document says notarised or wet-ink, no drawn signature substitutes for it.

What makes it hold up

What usually matters in a dispute is not the beauty of the mark but the trail around it: who sent the file, when it was signed, from which address. The drawn signature is the visible part of a much longer record.

You can build any of these in the browser: open the Signature maker, draw or type your name, and place the result straight onto a PDF or Word file. Nothing is uploaded — the document never leaves your device.