Form Desk

Fill and sign a PDF without uploading it

Open the form, click where an answer goes, type. Click Signature, sign with your mouse, finger, or stylus, and place it on the line. Add checkmarks and dates the same way, drag anything into position, then save — the output is a normal flattened PDF ready to email back. Think about what's in the PDFs people sign — leases, tax forms, medical intake — and "we upload it to our servers to process it" stops sounding fine. This page has no server, and works offline if you save it.

A whole PDF workshop, in five tabs

• Fill & sign — type into real form fields (Form Desk finds them and puts a box on each), add text, checkmarks, dates and a drawn or uploaded signature, and annotate: highlight, boxes, lines, and freehand drawing. A Redact tool covers content in black and, on apply, flattens the page to an image so the covered content is genuinely gone — not just hidden.
• Pages — every page as a card: reorder, rotate, crop, delete, append another PDF (merge), extract a selection, or split into one-file-per-page or custom ranges.
• Stamp — a diagonal watermark and page numbers across the whole document.
• Export — turn pages into images (PNG/JPG at your chosen resolution), pull the text out, compress a heavy scan down to a compact file, or OCR a scanned PDF into selectable text or a searchable PDF — the recogniser runs entirely on your device.
• Metadata — read, edit, or strip the document's hidden self-description (author, creating software, dates) — the PDF companion to our Photo Cleaner.

Honest limitations

• Everything except editing existing text is here — reflowing text already set in the PDF is the one thing no browser tool does honestly (even Acrobat locks it behind Pro), so Form Desk lets you cover or redact it and stamp new text on top instead.
• Compressing and redacting rebuild the affected pages as images, so text there becomes non-selectable — that's the trade for a smaller file, and for redaction it's the point (the content can't be recovered).
• Typed text uses the standard Helvetica font, which covers Western languages — other scripts aren't supported in text stamps yet.
• This makes a signed-looking document, not a cryptographic e-signature. For "print, sign, scan, email back," it replaces the printer.
• Password-protected PDFs are unlocked for you — enter the password when prompted and Form Desk opens a flattened, editable copy with the lock removed. To add a password, encrypt the file with Lock Box. OCR is English and best on clean scans; very large files render and recognise on your own machine, so they can be slow.
• Tip: draw and save a reusable signature at Inkwell once, then upload the PNG here whenever a form needs signing.

Same shelf: Inkwell draws the reusable signature this desk places · Draft Desk edits Word documents · Photo Cleaner does for photos what the Metadata tab does for PDFs.

Part of K-Engine Local Tools — free, privacy-respecting utilities that run on your device. Built on Mozilla's pdf.js and pdf-lib, both open source, both running locally. Sibling: Draft Desk for quick Word-document edits. MIT licensed, from the K-Engine workshop · download the source.