pdf—makeTOOLKIT
Secure

Secure and sign

Passwords, signatures and making scanned documents searchable.

Add a watermark to a PDFStamp a word across every page — DRAFT, CONFIDENTIAL, a company name.Edit PDF metadataChange what a PDF says about itself — title, author, subject, keywords — or clear the fields entirely before you send it to someone.Sign a PDFDraw your signature with a mouse, trackpad or finger — or type your name if you would rather — then place it on the page you choose.

Signatures: two things with the same name

A visible signature is a drawing placed on the page. The other kind is a certificate embedded in the file, which establishes identity mathematically and breaks if anybody alters the document afterwards. They share a word and almost nothing else.

For most everyday agreements a visible electronic signature is what is wanted and what is accepted, though the rules vary by country and document type. Anyone who receives a signed file can extract the signature image from it — that is true of every visible-signature tool, and it is a reason to be careful who you send signed documents to rather than a flaw in any particular one.

Marking a document is not the same as protecting it

A watermark stamped across every page announces a document's status to everyone who opens it. It is drawn into the page content rather than added as a removable layer, which makes it awkward to strip, but it is a clear marking rather than a security control.

Clearing the document properties before sending is a genuinely useful habit. Whoever set up the template you started from is often still recorded as the author, and that record survives every copy until somebody deliberately blanks it. It clears the standard fields, not every trace, so treat it as one layer rather than the whole job.

What is deliberately not here

There is no password or encryption tool on this site, and no tool for removing one. Applying or stripping PDF encryption requires a cryptographic security handler that cannot run in the browser, and building it server-side would mean receiving your documents — which is precisely what this site is built to avoid.

The same reasoning rules out character recognition for scans and conversion to Word, Excel or PowerPoint. Each needs a processing engine on a server. Rather than publish pages for tools that would break the promise made everywhere else here, they are simply not offered.