How to sign a PDF on iPad with Apple Pencil

If you own an iPad and an Apple Pencil, you already have the best signature hardware most people will ever touch. Everything that makes a finger-drawn signature look wrong — the thick blunt stroke, the wobble, the way you have to draw it four times the size of your real one — goes away the moment you use a stylus with a proper tip on a screen that tracks it precisely.

So the good news first: you probably don’t need to install anything to sign one PDF.

Option 1: iOS Markup with the Pencil (free, already there)

Markup is built into iPadOS and it takes Pencil input everywhere a PDF opens — Mail, Files, Books, Safari downloads:

Open the PDF (tap the attachment in Mail, or the file in Files).
Tap the Markup icon — the pen tip in a circle, top right.
Tap + → Signature → Add or Remove Signature if you’ve saved one before.
Draw your signature with the Pencil in the box that appears, then tap Done.
Drag it onto the signature line and resize with the corner handles.
Done → share the signed copy back (in Mail, it offers to attach it to a reply).

Signatures you create here are saved, so the second document is faster than the first.

Two Pencil-specific things worth knowing:

Palm rejection is on by default. Rest your hand on the glass and write at normal size and normal speed. This is the single biggest reason a Pencil signature looks like your signature and a finger signature doesn’t — you’re not drawing a giant approximation any more, you’re just signing.
You can also just ink straight onto the page. Instead of the Signature tool, pick the pen from the Markup toolbar and sign directly on the line. It looks great and takes two seconds. The catch: it’s a one-off — nothing is saved, so you redraw it on every document, and the ink lands as an annotation layer rather than as part of the page.

Where Markup is genuinely enough: a one-off PDF, a simple signature line, no date or initials to worry about. If that’s you, stop here. You don’t need an app.

Where it starts to grate, honestly: dates and initials are manual text boxes you nudge into position by hand; a contract that wants initials on all fourteen pages becomes real work; there’s no field-by-field flow, so you’re eyeballing placement each time; and the export keeps your marks as annotations rather than flattening them into the page.

Option 2: a signature app (when signing is a routine, not an event)

If PDFs land in your inbox regularly — freelance contracts, client paperwork, school forms, leases — the maths changes. What you want is to draw the signature properly once, with the Pencil, and never draw it again.

Signed runs on iPad as well as iPhone, and the flow is:

Import the PDF — share it in from Mail or Files.
Create your signature once. Draw it with the Pencil (this is the version worth spending two minutes on), or type your name and pick a handwriting style, or let AI generate one if your real one is a mess.
Tap where it goes. Signature, initials, today’s date, printed name, text and checkmarks are each one tap — the date and initials auto-fill rather than being typed into a box you positioned by hand.
Finish → you get a flattened PDF, signature merged into the page, and share it straight back.

The privacy point matters more on a tablet than people assume, because iPads accumulate the heavier paperwork — contracts, tax documents, anything you sat down to read properly. Signed is local-first: the PDF never leaves the device, unlike the cloud e-sign services that take an upload before they’ll let you sign anything.

Getting a Pencil signature that actually looks good

Three things that make a visible difference, whichever route you take:

Sign at your normal size. The instinct carried over from writing on a PDF on iPhone with your finger is to draw huge. With the Pencil you don’t have to, and normal size preserves the rhythm and proportions that make it recognisably yours.
Sign fast. Signatures are muscle memory. Tracing slowly produces a shaky, careful-looking scrawl that doesn’t match your ink one.
Do it three or four times and keep the best. You’re saving this for years of documents. It’s worth thirty seconds. If you want to experiment with letterforms before you commit, the free signature generator runs in the browser and gives you a transparent PNG to compare against.

Which should you pick?

You sign a PDF a few times a year → Markup. Free, on the device, done.
You sign monthly or more, or documents come with dates and initials → an app pays for itself in the first week of avoided fiddling.
The document has real legal weight — a deed, a will, an affidavit — → a signature image on a PDF may not satisfy what’s actually required; notarisation or witnesses often are. Check what’s needed for that document type before you assume signing is the last step.