Signature rules for Indian exams

Signature uploads fail more often than photographs. Partly because the rules are stricter than people expect, and partly because a scanned signature is almost always too small a file.

Running handwriting, never capitals

This is the rule people break most, and it is stated explicitly in SSC, IBPS and NTA notifications: the signature must be in running handwriting. A name written in block capitals is not a signature and is rejected.

The reason is that a signature is meant to be reproducible by you and difficult for anyone else, and block capitals are neither distinctive nor hard to copy. Whatever you sign on your bank documents is what belongs here.

It also has to match. Boards compare the uploaded signature against the one you write on the attendance sheet on exam day and on the admit card. A signature that does not match can be treated as impersonation, which is far more serious than a rejected upload.

Black ink on white paper

Notifications generally specify black ink on plain white unruled paper. Some accept blue. Very few accept anything else.

Sign on blank paper, not on a ruled page and not inside a box on a form. A ruled line running through your signature is difficult to remove cleanly and looks like a defect.

Use a pen that puts down solid ink — a gel or ballpoint pen. A fine-tipped pen produces thin strokes that nearly disappear once the image is scaled down to 140 x 60 pixels.

Size on the page

Sign at a comfortable, natural size — roughly the size of a signature in a cheque box, around 4 to 5 cm wide. Do not sign tiny, and do not sign enormous.

The reason is resolution. When a signature is photographed and cropped to the ink, a larger signature simply carries more detail into the final file.

Photographing it

You do not need a scanner. A phone camera works, with a little care:

1. Put the paper on a flat, well-lit surface, away from your own shadow.
2. Hold the phone directly above, parallel to the paper — not at an angle.
3. Fill the frame with the signature and a little margin.
4. Do not use flash. It creates a hotspot and a hard shadow at the pen strokes.

Photographed paper looks grey rather than white, because the camera exposes for the average of the scene. That is normal and fixable — our resizer has a background clean-up slider that maps the grey paper to pure white while keeping the ink's soft edges. Turn it on for any signature and adjust until the background is clean but the strokes are not broken.

The file size problem

A signature is mostly one flat colour, which compresses extremely well. A clean scan can land at 2 or 3 KB, and most portals set a floor of 4, 10 or even 20 KB.

Raising the JPEG quality often is not enough, because there is genuinely very little detail to encode. The correct fix is padding the file with blank comment data that decoders ignore, which our tool does automatically. See why portals reject files that are too small for the detail — and for why some tools handle this by degrading your image instead.

If you have no way to scan

Our signature pad lets you draw a signature with a finger or a stylus, on the signature tab of any exam page.

If you do use the pad, use a stylus if you have one, draw at a natural speed rather than slowly and carefully, and practise a few times. You can save a signature to reuse across the four separate uploads that bank exams require — it stays in your browser and is never sent anywhere.

Bank exams need four uploads

IBPS, SBI, RBI and the other banking recruiters ask for four separate images, each with its own dimensions:

These are the sizes we currently list and they are not verified against a notification — check yours. The thumb impression and declaration guide covers the two people find unfamiliar.