The document does not look right

Pages, fonts and layout, and what to do when a file does not survive upload.

Last updated 26/08/2026

If you added a Word file, what you are looking at is the result of converting it to a PDF, and the quickest fix is to export the PDF from Word yourself and add that instead. If it was already a PDF, the cause is almost always in the file rather than in the conversion, and the sections below cover the three that come up most.

Check the layout before you send. The field placement step shows every page, and View in the Documents library, or in the Documents panel of any envelope (the document you sent out for signature, together with the people asked to sign it), shows the file exactly as your recipients will see it.

Word files are converted to a PDF

CecurSign accepts .doc and .docx and converts them to a PDF before fields can be placed, so what recipients see is the converted version. Most documents come through unchanged. The things that move are the things that were already fragile: an unusual font that only your machine has, floating text boxes, a table fitted exactly to the width of the page, and elaborate headers and footers.

The reliable route is to open the document in Word, export or save it as a PDF, and add that PDF. Word does the conversion with your own fonts on your own machine, so the result is the layout you designed. See Using Word documents.

Scanned documents

A scan is a picture of a page, so the text in it is not text as far as any computer is concerned. That is not a problem for signing: you drag signature and date fields onto the page in the usual way and your recipient fills them in as usual.

Two things are worth knowing. You will not be able to select or search the words in it, and a high resolution colour scan can be a very large file. Scanning in greyscale at 200 to 300 dots per inch gives a page that reads well on a phone at a fraction of the size. See Which files you can upload, and how large.

Pages sideways or upside down

Each page carries its own orientation inside the file, and we display it as the file specifies, so a page that was scanned sideways stays sideways for your recipient too.

Fix it at source. Rotate the pages in whatever produced the file, save it, and add the corrected version. Most scanning software and every mainstream PDF tool can rotate pages and save the result; what matters is that you save the rotation into the file rather than only turning it on screen in your viewer, which changes nothing about the file itself.

Pages missing, blank or garbled

Open the same file in your own PDF reader first. If it looks wrong there too, the file is damaged or was exported badly, and re-exporting it from the program that created it is the fix.

If a page is blank in both, it is usually an image that failed to embed when the PDF was made. Re-export and check the page before adding it.

Everything looks right but the fields do not

If the pages are correct and it is the placement of a signature or date box that is off, that is a matter of moving them rather than of the file. See Placing signature and other fields.

Before you send

Look at every page while you are placing fields. A document that is going to a client is worth thirty seconds, and it is far easier to change a draft than to withdraw an envelope that is already out. If you do need to, see Cancel an envelope someone has already opened.