The tray is a ritual. The proof is a plate.
The old sequence is theatre: print the spread, sign in the margin, photograph the sheet on a cutting mat, impose the photo, send. Sometimes the theatre is required — a tutor who wants paper, a client who frames the signed print. Often it is habit. They asked for a PDF with your name on it. That is a plate with ink, not a pilgrimage to the copier.
On Pdfmira, Sign is that plate. You leave the volume on the light table, place the stroke, watch it at cover size, download. Guest flow. The original on your disk stays whole. Files here expire; keep your master. This studio is Giannico Costantiello, VAT 08910530727, Turi — a magazine-lab, not a notary’s office.
What you are actually putting down
Visible ink: a PNG, a stroke, a name that a human can see. It prints. It photographs. It does not cipher, timestamp, or identify you to a public administration. It is the same gesture as a pen on a proof, without the paper.
A qualified electronic signature — the eIDAS family, SPID or CIE when used as signing identity in Italy — is another desk entirely. Pdfmira does not issue it. If the call, the contract or the campus form wrote “digital signature”, “qualified”, “timestamp”, stop. This essay is for proofs, lookbooks, internal approvals, the client who said “sign the PDF and send it back”. The longer argument lives in Visible ink is not eIDAS.
Prepare the sheet before the ink
A crooked scan is not a signature problem. Rotate first, or edit the volume if a blank leaf, a duplicate cover or a page from another job is still in the signature. Ink on the wrong folio is how a proof leaves the studio lying. Order of operations: tidy, then mark.
Transparent PNG, tight crop, dark stroke. A JPEG of a signature on a café table brings the tablecloth. Place it where the grid left a box — often the lower right of a contract-like colophon, sometimes a margin the designer drew on purpose. Not across a price. Not as a hero on the cover unless the brief is the cover.
Weight after the mark
A photographic lookbook with a PNG on the last plate can still be too heavy for mail. Compress PDF after you like the preview, not before: you cannot judge a stroke from a smear. Screen stock for screens. Print stock for the shop downstairs. If the ink turns to dust, keep the heavier file.
This is not a lock. Anyone with the PDF can copy the image of your name onto another sheet. Rights live in the brief and in the mail thread, not in pixels. If the volume is confidential, ask whether a converter on the public web is the right bench. The light table is honest about retention. It is not a vault.
A Sunday proof, not a clerk’s Tuesday
You are looking. That is the product. Paperza, same controller, will sign the same errand as a fifteen-second commission without asking you to enjoy the plate. Send a parent there. Stay here when the proof is visual: crop, weight, whether the stroke sits in the margin you designed. No stars. No clone of a yellow icon farm. The index lists sign beside rotate and compress because a studio must mark sheets. That does not make us a consumer dropzone.
Download. Hand in. Keep the unmarked master. If they come back asking for page 4 only, edit, then sign again. The roll of jobs is metadata. The archive is yours.