How to type your signature instead of drawing it on iPhone

You’ve drawn it six times with your finger and it still looks like a heart monitor. So you go looking for the option to just type your name — and you can’t find it. That’s not you missing a menu. Here’s what your iPhone can and can’t do, in the order worth trying.

First, the thing that’s costing you ten minutes: the signature tool is draw-only

Markup’s signature feature has no typing option. You get there with pencil (Markup) icon → + → Signature → Add or Remove Signature → +, and what appears is a blank line and your finger. That’s the whole tool.

The arrow next to New Signature looks like it should help — tap it and you get given name, nickname, initials. That’s a slot picker. It’s asking which of the three signatures you’re about to draw, so your full signature and your initials can be stored separately and offered separately later. Pick any of them and you still get the blank line.

So stop hunting for it. If you want typed, you want a different tool.

The free typed route your iPhone actually has: the Text tool

Markup’s Text tool is separate from its signature tool, and that one does type.

Open the PDF and tap the pencil (Markup) icon.
Tap + in the bottom corner → Text.
Double-tap the box that appears and type your name.
Tap the aA button to change the typeface and size.
Drag it onto the signature line and pinch to size it.

Free, built in, no account. Three honest limits before you rely on it:

The font list is short. On iPhone the Text tool offers Helvetica, Georgia and Noteworthy. Noteworthy is the only one that reads as handwriting at all, and it’s a marker-style print face — there’s no cursive in there.
It isn’t saved as a signature. It’s a text box on this document. The next form you get, you type it again and resize it again.
It looks typed. Anyone glancing at the line sees your name set in a font, not a mark. On an internal form or a delivery note, nobody blinks. On something a person will actually look at, it’s obvious.

That third point is usually the dealbreaker, which is why the next route exists.

A typed signature that looks like a signature (still free, in a browser)

Type your name into our free signature generator, switch to the Type tab, and you get it rendered in 15 real handwriting and cursive faces — flowing formal scripts, brush pens, loose everyday scrawls — then download it as a transparent PNG or an SVG. No signup, no watermark. If you want to see your own name in each style before you commit, the cursive signature pages show exactly that.

The catch, and it’s specific to iPhone: Markup can’t insert an image into a PDF. So that PNG solves any document you open in an app that accepts images — Word, Pages, Google Docs, an email — and it does not solve the PDF your landlord emailed you. There’s no free path on iOS from “saved signature image” to “placed on this PDF”. If the transparent background is the part you’re wrestling with, that’s its own problem worth reading up on.

Typed or drawn — how to actually choose

On appearance and effort alone:

Draw it if the signature will sit next to one already on file, if you sign the same way on paper and want it to match, or if you have an Apple Pencil — a Pencil gets you most of the way to your real signature in a way a fingertip never does. If you’d rather get the drawing right than give up on it, there are tricks that make a drawn signature look far less shaky.
Type it if your finger-drawn attempt is unrecognisable, if you want it identical on every document, or if you sign often enough that consistency matters more than authenticity.

One tell worth knowing either way: a typed signature is identical to the pixel every time, and a real one never is. On a permission slip nobody is checking. What a typed signature means on a particular document is a different question entirely — it depends on the document and where you are, not on which tool made it, and the wet-signature comparison is the place to read about that.

If you sign more than occasionally

The free routes above genuinely cover the once-a-year form. What they don’t cover is the repetition: retyping your name, resizing the box, doing it again for the initials, again for the date, again on page four.

That’s the part Signed removes. Its signature studio has a Type tab next to Draw and Scan — type your name, pick from Elegant, Classic, Bold or Clean, and it’s saved to your signature locker as a reusable asset, not a text box on one document. If none of the four fit, the AI tab will generate a handwritten signature from your name instead. After that, any PDF is: share it in, tap where the signature, initials and date belong, export a flattened copy. It’s a paid app, and it stays local-first — the document never leaves your iPhone.

If you’re still deciding between all of this and the built-in route, the full comparison of ways to create an electronic signature on iPhone lays out the three options side by side.