You can finally sign PDFs with your finger or a stylus directly inside Google Drive

Are you tired of taking the clunky printer out of your closet just to spit out a handful of PDF sheets to sign for a highly specific circumstance once in a blue moon? Are you lacking a stylus or Chromebook tablet device with some form of written input to avoid the printer? I know that many users have their printer or inking tools set up all of the time and operate them often, but for myself and others, these are rarely necessary.

However, when the time comes that we need to sign a contract, release form, or something else vital to our agenda and business relationships, it’s an absolute must. Google is now adding finger and stylus input to PDF signing directly in Drive for Android, which can spare us from such an arduous task.

“Use your finger or a stylus to freely write annotations on a file shown in the Drive preview screen on Android Devices”, Google says in its latest Workspace Updates blog post. According to the company, these annotations can be saved to the file if it’s a PDF or a PDF copy of the file can alternatively be made with the annotations saved to it, preserving the original.

If you’d like to try this out, it should be available immediately for all Workspace and G Suite customers with both Rapid Release and Scheduled Release domains. To call it up, just open the Drive app for Android, touch a PDF file you want to sign to reveal its “Preview” screen, and then choose the “Annotate” pen icon at the bottom right.

From there, a toolbar will open with multiple annotation tools. You can use a stylus or simply sign with your finger before sending it off to whoever needs it on the fly. It may seem strange, but as someone who prefers to lean entirely into modern technologies wherever possible, dealing with the printer (despite the fact that they’re still widely used) is just so frustrating and I prefer to avoid it where possible.

In addition to the pen tool, there’s also a marker, highlighter, eraser, and undo and redo buttons available to you for a markup experience similar to that of Google Keep or the annotation tools built directly into the ChromeOS Gallery app. Let me know if you’ll also go through the lengths I do to remain digital or if you’re okay with printing things off and re-scanning them after inking them with a real pen.