My Adobe Reader won't let me sign documents

Report · Feb 18, 2020

I have Adobe Reader. Someone on my team sent me a document to sign. When I went to the "Sign" tab in the upper right-hand side of the ribbon and clicked the "I Need to Sign" dropdown menu, everything was grayed out. I have confirmed with the sender that she's able to sign the document (she has Acrobat, not Reader). I've looked at the document properties and under Security, it's confirmed that Signing is not allowed, but when the sender looks at the properties on her end it says Signing is allowed and she's not adjusting anything before she sends it to me. I also tried clicking in the field to sign. I get no cursor and no dialog boxes pop up even though when I hover over the signature box IT SAYS "SIGNATURE (CLICK TO SIGN)"!

My question is what do I need to change to allow me to sign this document? I just sat with the Adobe helpdesk for an hour and they were worthless. In three different ways, they asked me to click the "Sign" tab and then click to sign. I was frustrated with the issue initially, but now I'm really annoyed after wasting an hour with someone who's final solution was to download the 7-day trial version of Acrobat. I am going to have to sign documents for the foreseeable future and we have clients externally who we will also need to sign things from time to time so having me simply upgrade to Acrobat, temporarily or permanently is not going to work.

I have Adobe Reader XI. Can someone please help me with this problem?

Report · Feb 18, 2020

You're using an old version and unsupported version of Adobe Acrobat Reader.

You need to try with Adobe Acrobat Reader DC, not Adobe Acrobat Pro. There is a possibility that the creator of the document didn't save the document as Reader Extended which allows backward compatibility with older versions if the creator of the form is aware of this.

Adobe Acrobat Reader DC is freeware (open source), free to download, and allows you to fill, sign, view, print, comment and save documents.

You'll need, however, your AdobeID to sign-in with Reader DC in order to use some of the online collaboration features and document cloud services.

Last, if the creator of the form would've created the form with the Fill & Sign tool and used Adobe Sign to send the document out for signatures you wouldn't be going through this hassle as you can sign even from a mobile device or web browser.

See if any of the suggestions above help you in any way.

You can also try and click on Help, then repair installtion. After the repair is performed re-apply the latest planned update that was released for your version: https://www.adobe.com/devnet-docs/acrobatetk/tools/ReleaseNotes/11/11.0.23.html

Sometimes re-applying this patch fix a few things.