Why does my signature not fit properly into the field?

We often get asked, why certain signatures do not properly fit into the signing field - especially if your signature is taller than it is wide. This is for a few reasons and they are related to the technical way the signature fields are set and behave.

Firstly, however, we would like to mention, that the size of the signature has no bearing in its legal validity - that rests on the digital certificate which is used to seal the signature on the document.

Basically the biggest reason is, that the actual zone in which your signature has to fit has fixed aspect ratio, which always remains the same, even when you resize the whole signature field you see when preparing a document. Moreover, the actual field for the signature is always centered in the whole field - so even if you make the field very tall and narrow, it will get centered, and the aspect ratio will remain, making the actual signature appear quite small.

Another part of this, which relates to the fixed aspect ration, is that each signature has something we call an envelope. This envelope can contain necessary additional information about the signature, such as ID or a timestamp, and this information has to fit into the field. Which means that the actual signature design you as an end user input into the field is just one part of all the information that needs to be contained in the field.

To ensure you are always aware of what the size if the envelope where the signature will be placed is, we have a placeholder border in each signing field, that illustrates the actual size, no matter the resizing of the whole field.

Here is an example with two differently sized fields:

You can see that despite the blue field being quite large, the actual area in which the signature will be displayed is quite small.

Another reason for the fixed aspect ratio is that we support the option of typing out your signature, which is simply always wider than it is taller.

Hopefully this answers the question of why sometimes your signature may be a different size than you expected.