How can I add text and images (for example, a signature) to a PDF?

Question

On occasion I receive forms to fill in as PDFs intended for printing (these are not true PDF forms, they do not contain fields). I would like to type onto them, and perhaps add a scanned copy of my signature. This way I could just email them back. Is this possible?

Answer 1

There is no perfect way to do this yet. The best existing way is to install Xournal from the software center and open PDF files with it. It allows you to annotate them and then export the whole thing as a new PDF.

Since you are basically marking up a new layer on top of the original PDF, you have to line up everything as you type, and manually position all your notes. For a simple document it's pretty easy to do. It's not very practical for longer documents, though.

Answer 2

Open the pdf in LibreOffice Draw and copy/paste there any image, including that of a signature (or Insert -Picture - From File), which then can be easily adjusted/resized to fit the purpose. After that, under File - 'Export as PDF'

Answer 3

You can easily copy and paste part of a pdf document using PDF-XChange Viewer (running flowlessly with wine). (Google it you will see a lot of ubuntu users love it, it is very useful to annotate pdf documents.)

You select the signature (a rectangle around it) from another document, copy it and paste it where you want on the new document...

Answer 4

Another option is Scribus. I've used it to do the same task you're asking for (pasting an image of a signature).

As Tom Brossman said there is no perfect way to do that, and Scribus is the case. It has to import the file from the pdf format to the native one, and depending on the document it can get the text scrambled or the layers showed differently.