It's 2024 and I want to send a sign a contract and send it via e-mail to a company.
The company does not accept electronically signed PDF files (most don't), and even when they did - I don't have an electronic signature I can use with PDF files, nor do I know how to create one.
The only option I have is to sign the contract by hand: Print it out, write my signature with a pen, scan the signed paper and send the scan via e-mail to the company.
A variation of this option that takes less time and paper is to add an image of my signature to the PDF. But how can I do that? Let's look at the software on my Debian 12 laptop:
- Atril
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The PDF viewer shipped with the Mate Desktop environment tells me that it can't open PDF files.
- Evince
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The default Gnome PDF viewer can't add images to PDFs, since 9 years (new ticket)
- Okular
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The feature request is open since 2013, 11 years.
There seems to be a trick with stamps, but I failed because the KDE QT interface looks totally broken in Mate:
- Master PDF editor
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Inserts water marks because I have no license. Buying the license would mean giving money to a Russian company, which is something I won't do with the Russia's war against the Ukraine happening.
- PDF4QT
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Adding a .png or .jpg image crashes the application.
- Inkscape
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I could import the multi-page PDF, but then I failed to find out how to switch to the second page :(
- LibreOffice Draw
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The text in the imported PDF does not look as it should.
Solution: Firefox
In the end I opened the PDF in Firefox, which contains an PDF editor.
It's sad that I have to use a browser for something that a native PDF tool should be able to do.