The One That Liberated Us from Adobe Acrobat (kinda)
How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love AI: Experiment 4
I know you’ve seen this film before: Technology makes simple things unnecessarily complicated. Take, for instance, the simple act of signing a PDF. How did it become so convoluted? Why do I need to jump through seventeen hoops, sign up for a subscription, and sell my soul just to plop my signature on a damn rent receipt?
As you’ve probably guessed, this AI experiment was born from a very specific and tiny frustration. My wife would regularly send me PDFs that needed her signature. She’d send them to me because her signature was stored in my Adobe Acrobat app, which is part of my paid Creative Cloud subscription. Yup, it’s 2025, and free Acrobat users don’t get this basic feature.
The obvious solution would have been getting her an Adobe CC or other PDF signature app subscription of her own. But paying a fee for something she only needs once or twice a month seemed, well, slightly ridiculous. The alternative was using one of the “free” online PDF signing tools, which, as anyone who’s ventured into that particular corner of the internet knows, will bombard you with ads, constant upgrade prompts, and possibly even hold your PDF hostage until you sign up for their newsletter.
Enter ‘No Bullshit PDF’ (working title). The concept was simple: upload the PDF you need to sign, add your signature, download the signed PDF, and GTFO. No accounts, no subscriptions, no “premium features” – just the digital equivalent of signing a piece of paper and being done with it.
The Technical Journey
Building this turned out to be more straightforward and complex than anticipated. The basic functionality — letting users upload PDFs and signatures — was simple enough. But then came The Great Positioning Debacle of 2024.
Here’s the thing about PDFs that nobody tells you: getting a signature to appear precisely where you want it is a dark art. The preview window in the app would show the signature in one spot, but the exported PDF would have it somewhere completely different.
I spent a frankly embarrassing amount of time trying to perfect this positioning system. The mathematics involved seemed manageable: log where the user clicks on the preview, apply some basic coordinates, and place signature on the final PDF.
But the fix was anything but easy. The eventual solution involved a fair bit of trial and error, multiple late-night debugging sessions with Cursor and Claude, and eventually, a compromise. It’s not perfect — sometimes the signature still ends up a few pixels off from the preview — but it’s close enough that most folks won’t notice (there, I shot myself in the foot).
Where We Ended Up
What started as an elementary tool to solve a specific problem has evolved into something that actually works well. Upload a PDF, see it in the preview window, add your signature (either by uploading an image or drawing directly in the app), click where you want the signature to appear, make any necessary adjustments, and download your signed PDF.
The tool does exactly one thing and does it reasonably well. It’s not going to revolutionise the world of document signing, but it might save you from having to subscribe to yet another service just to put your name on a piece of digital paper.
This is what I love about this new AI revolution: solving these tiny (and sometimes not-so-tiny) problems in our everyday lives is suddenly possible. I have so many tiny frustrations throughout my day that I’ve just accepted because there was no alternative or the alternative was too difficult/expensive/time-consuming. No longer!
“You can just build stuff”. And boy, is it fun.
Go sign your first PDF with the tool at this link!
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Next up in this series: How I built an AI-powered app that helps you find the perfect film for your current emotional state.
As always, watch this space!
