Signature Generator
Draw, type, or clean up a scanned signature
Signature Generator tool
Signature Generator: key facts
- What it does
- Draw, type, or clean up a scanned signature
- Category
- Generators
- Cost
- Free, with no account, sign-up, or install.
- Your data
- Runs entirely in your browser — the files and text you enter are never uploaded to a server.
- Last reviewed
- . Report an incorrect result.
What this tool is for
A signature you can drop into a contract, a form or an email footer has to be ink and nothing else — no white rectangle, no grey box where the paper used to be. This generator makes one three ways: sign it freehand, set your name in a handwriting face, or hand it a photo of your signature on paper and have the paper thresholded away.
Freehand mode is stroke-based rather than a bitmap, which is what makes the rest of it work. Four pens behave differently — the ballpoint holds an even line, the fountain nib thins as the stroke accelerates, the marker lays down a wide translucent mark, and the brush swings hardest between thin and thick. A stylus that reports pressure drives the width directly; a mouse or finger falls back to speed. Because the marks are stored as paths and not pixels, the smoothing and weight sliders reshape strokes you already made, the eraser and Ctrl+Z both work, and the same signature exports crisply at 400 px or 4000 px.
Type mode offers 25 handwriting faces grouped into signature scripts, everyday handwriting and casual brush, with size, letter spacing and a stroke-weight control that outlines the glyphs to fake a heavier pen. Scan mode is the one for people who already sign on paper: threshold, edge softness, contrast, despeckle, straighten and mirror controls turn a phone photo into clean transparent ink, and an auto button reads the image histogram to place the threshold for you.
How to use the Signature Generator
- Pick Draw, Type or "Clean up a scan" at the top.
- Draw: choose a pen, sign on the pad with a mouse, finger or stylus, and use the eraser, undo or Clear if a stroke goes wrong.
- Type: enter your name, then browse the font list — each entry previews in its own face — and set the size, spacing and weight.
- Scan: drop, paste or choose a photo of your signature, hit Auto threshold, then nudge the threshold, despeckle and straighten sliders until only ink is left.
- Adjust the shared slant, trim the result to the ink and give it some padding.
- Set the export width and check the print-size readout — 600 px is two inches at 300 DPI, the size most documents want.
- Choose PNG, WebP, JPG or SVG, then download the file or copy it straight to the clipboard.
What the Signature Generator gets right
- Nothing is uploaded. Strokes, the threshold pass and every export are computed on a canvas in your own browser, which matters more here than for most tools — a signature image is worth protecting. The one network request is the handwriting fonts, fetched from Google Fonts only when you open Type mode.
- The scan cleaner uses a soft alpha ramp instead of a hard cut-off, so the pen's feathered edge survives and the result sits on a document like ink rather than a cut-out. Despeckling removes the paper grain and JPEG noise that a plain threshold turns into flecks.
- Trim measures the real bounding box by scanning the rendered alpha, so it accounts for erased areas, translucent marker and soft scan edges instead of guessing from coordinates.
- The preview panel is the file: same renderer, same view box, with the actual pixel dimensions, physical size at your chosen DPI, and a byte count taken from a real encode.
- Drawn signatures can leave as SVG — the stroke paths themselves, so they scale without limit. Typed and scanned signatures cannot, and the tool says so rather than writing a raster inside a .svg wrapper.
Frequently Asked Questions
Will the exported signature have a transparent background?
With the background set to Transparent, yes — PNG, WebP and SVG all carry the alpha channel through, and the checkerboard you see behind the ink is the page, never part of the file. JPEG is the exception: the format has no transparency, so a transparent request is written on white and the tool tells you it did that.
Can it remove the background from a photo of my signature?
That is what Clean up a scan does. Sign a blank sheet, photograph it, and drop the image in. Everything darker than the threshold becomes ink and everything lighter becomes transparent; Auto threshold picks a starting point from the image's own histogram, and the despeckle slider drops the tiny blobs that paper texture leaves behind. There is also a switch for the reverse case — light ink on a dark surface, such as a whiteboard.
Does my signature leave my device?
No. The image is drawn, thresholded and encoded locally, and the download comes from a blob your browser already holds. Only the handwriting font files are requested from the network, and only in Type mode.
What size should I export for a Word document or a PDF?
Match the print resolution rather than the screen. At 300 DPI a 600 px wide signature prints two inches across, which suits most signature lines; 1200 px gives you four inches with room to scale down. The readout under the preview converts pixels to inches and millimetres for the DPI you select, and changing DPI never resamples anything — it only tells you how big the pixels you already have will land on paper.
Is a signature made here legally binding?
An image of a signature is not the same thing as a certified e-signature. Many jurisdictions do accept electronic signatures, but the rules depend on the country, the document and often on an audit trail that only a dedicated e-signature service can produce. This tool gives you the picture; whether the picture is enough is a question for the platform or the law that governs your document.
