Document field tags

You can tell Sign Sail where every signature, date, and text field belongs without dragging a single box. Write a short tag in the document itself, something like {{sig:s1}} where signer one should sign, and Sign Sail finds it when you upload the PDF and drops the field right there. The tag text gets covered with a white box before anyone sees the document, so signers get a clean page with just the fields on it.

This is the fastest way to prep a contract you already have as a Word or Google doc. Add the tags before you export to PDF, upload once, done.

How to add a tag

Put the tag text in your document wherever the field should sit: in a signature line, a date blank, a cell in a table. The position of the tag is the position of the field. A few ground rules:

Keep each tag on one line, and use a normal text font (not an image or a form field). The braces matter: a tag always opens with {{ and closes with }}. Capitalization doesn't matter: {{ SIG }} and {{sig}} place the same field. Spaces inside the braces never change a tag's meaning either, but padding does set the field's width — see custom sizes below.

What happens after you upload

Reading a PDF's text takes a moment, so Sign Sail scans for tags in the background instead of making you wait. Right after upload the document shows Detecting fields… and then settles into one of two states: ready if it found tags and placed fields, or draft if it found none (you can still place fields by hand). Nothing is sent at this point; sending is always a separate, deliberate step.

Once detection finishes you'll see how many fields were placed, plus any warnings, such as a tag it couldn't read or a signer number that skips one. Review the placements, fix anything that looks off, then send.

The tag syntax

Every tag follows the same shape. Only the type is required; everything after it is optional and can come in any order.

{{ type[:sN][:opt][:w=pt][:h=pt] }}

Field types

The type comes first, right after the opening braces. Use whichever name reads best; the aliases all map to the same field:

sig or signature for a signature, init/initial/initials for initials, date for the signing date, text for a typed text box, check or checkbox for a checkbox, and name and emailfor the signer's name and address.

Assigning fields to signers

Add :s followed by a number to say which signer a field belongs to: {{sig:s2}}is signer two's signature. Leave it off and the field goes to signer one. You can have up to twenty signers (:s1 through :s20), and the numbers should run without gaps: if you use :s2 somewhere, make sure a :s1 exists too, or detection will flag it.

Optional fields and custom sizes

Fields are required by default. Add :opt to let a signer skip one: {{text:s1:opt}} is an optional note field. Each field type also has a sensible default size, but if you need a specific box you can set the width and height in PDF points with :w= and :h=, like {{sig:s1:w=160:h=44}}.

There's a quicker way to widen a field without thinking in points: pad the tag with spaces. If a tag has whitespace just inside the braces, the field becomes exactly as wide as the printed tag, so {{ text:s1 }}stretched across an address blank gives you a field that fills the blank. What you see is what you get: the tag's footprint on the page is the field. An explicit :w=always wins over padding, and unpadded tags keep their type's default size.

When a tag doesn't get placed

A handful of things will make Sign Sail skip a tag and warn you instead of guessing. A misspelled type ({{signatur}}) or an unknown option won't parse. Signer numbers outside 1 to 20 are rejected. Pages rotated sideways are skipped, and very large files (over 300 pages or 50 MB) aren't scanned. If a tag goes missing, check the warnings on the document; they point at the exact problem.