On Tue, Jun 10, 2008 at 14:30:18 -0500, Hugo Vanwoerkom wrote:
Hi,
People I do business with want me to physically sign a contract that
they send me as a small pdf (22K).
I use Adobe Reader to print it, I sign the printed copy and scan the
result and send the jpeg image back: 3 pages totalling 891K!
That is ridiculous. Is that the way everybody signs a pdf document?
It is easy to scan your own signature and convert it into a compact
vector-based PDF that can be scaled without loss of quality. I doubt
that this constitutes a true signature in the legal sense, but it is
quite handy, for example to send "signed" documents directly to a fax
pseudo-printer.
To put the signature into an original document, e.g. into a PDF
registration form, I use Latex to superimpose the PDFs, as well as to
fill in any additional data that the form requires. I know no other
approach that preserves the full printing quality of the original PDF
while keeping the final PDF small.
I can post a simple example how to do this with Latex if you are
interested. However, it would be rather obvious from the quality of
latex-produced PDF that the original or contract has not been printed,
signed and rescanned, so maybe your business partners would not accept
such a PDF.