How to Send a PDF for Signature

Sending a PDF for signature takes six steps:

• •Upload the PDF.
• •Add the person who needs to sign it.
• •Place the signature field, and any other fields they need to complete.
• •Send it.
• •Your recipient opens a secure link and signs — in Tarchos Sign, without creating an account.
• •You download the completed PDF, which now carries a completion certificate.

Most of that is mechanical. The two steps worth getting right are field placement and knowing what your recipient sees, so those get the most attention below.

1. Upload the PDF

Start from the finished document. Electronic signature tools add fields on top of a PDF; they are not word processors, so any wording changes should happen before you upload.

If your document started life in Word or Google Docs, export it to PDF first. Check the exported file before uploading — page breaks occasionally move during export, and a signature block that has drifted onto its own page is easier to fix now than after sending.

2. Add your recipient

A recipient is a name and an email address. The email address matters more than it appears to: it is where the signing link goes, and it is the identity recorded against every event in the audit trail.

If more than one person needs to act on the document, you can also set the order in which they receive it, so the second signer is only contacted once the first has finished. Recipients can also be added as viewers or copied in rather than as signers, when someone needs the document but is not signing it.

3. Place the fields

This is the step that determines whether signing feels obvious or confusing. You are telling the document where each person needs to act.

Tarchos Sign supports signature, initials, date signed, full name, email, free-text, and checkbox fields. Date, name, and email fields fill from the recipient's details rather than making them retype information you already have.

Two things worth doing: place a field everywhere the document expects one, including initials blocks partway through, and put fields where a person would sign on paper. A signature field floating in a margin creates hesitation at exactly the moment you want none.

4. Send it

Your recipient receives an email with a link to their own copy of the document. The link is specific to that recipient — it is issued as a one-time token and stored only as a hash, so it is not guessable from another recipient's link.

From this point the document is tracked. Opening, consenting, and signing are each recorded as separate timestamped events.

5. What your recipient sees

This is the part most senders never look at, and the part that determines whether the document comes back.

In Tarchos Sign the recipient opens the link, is shown an electronic record and signature disclosure to accept, then works through the fields assigned to them and confirms. They do not create an account, choose a password, or install anything, and the flow works in an ordinary mobile browser — which matters, because a good proportion of signatures happen on a phone shortly after the email arrives.

If you would rather see this yourself than take our word for it, you can sign a test document without creating an account.

6. Collect the completed document

Once everyone has signed, the document is complete and the signed PDF is available to download with a certificate of completion appended to it. Alongside it sits the audit trail — a timestamped record of who did what and when, which is what you would rely on if the signature were ever questioned.

Store the completed PDF the way you would store a signed paper original. The certificate travels inside the file, so a copy saved to your own systems keeps its evidence with it.

Common mistakes

• •Sending a draft. Fields are placed against a specific layout; replacing the document afterwards means placing them again.
• •Forgetting a second signer. If two people must sign, both need to be recipients — a shared inbox address does not produce two signatures.
• •Leaving out the date field. Many documents need a date next to the signature, and an automatic date field is more reliable than asking someone to type one.
• •Never testing the recipient view. Send one document to yourself before you send one to a client.