Signcopy: Fill and sign forms, original untouched

Someone sends you a form, a weekly logbook or a DOCX template to fill and sign, and the result keeps coming back wrong: retyped tables, missing mandatory fields, a signature too small to read, or a PDF when they wanted DOCX. Signcopy works on a copy in the original format, so the original stays untouched and the layout survives.

What it does

• Input check finds the file in your inbox folder by name and recent date and asks you to confirm when near-identical versions exist.
• Read by type handles PDF, DOCX and images, and counts DOCX text runs to detect image-based documents.
• Native-format edits replace text inside existing DOCX runs so styles stay, or fill fillable PDF fields.
• Signature and stamp are transplanted from your last signed file or one asset folder, starting at about 3.5 to 4 cm wide.
• Form rules are respected: mandatory fields kept, ticks inside boxes, comments inside comment boxes in short human bullets.
• Feedback documents are broken into numbered points, mapped to the exact section and checked against the real system before changes.

How it works

1. Locate and read the input, then render a preview of the real layout.
2. Summarise the plan and ask first if the instruction is unclear or the material is confidential.
3. Edit a copy saved with a status suffix such as - Signed.docx or - Filled.pdf.
4. Preview and compare against the original, then deliver to the outbox with a draft reply email if one is expected.

Frameworks & tools

Uses pdftotext, python-docx or zipfile with ElementTree for DOCX XML, pypdf or pdftk for fillable PDFs, and qlmanage, LibreOffice headless or pandoc with WeasyPrint and pdftoppm for previews.

Why this beats prompting it yourself

A generic prompt tends to retype the document or export an image. Signcopy edits runs in place, checks the media file count for signature and stamp, and compares previews side by side.

Use cases

• Weekly logbooks and timesheets signed with one script and a signer profile.
• Letters and forms filled, signed and returned with a reply draft.
• Client templates filled directly in DOCX XML.

Known limitations

Not for designing new documents from scratch. Image-based DOCX files cannot be find-and-replaced, so blocks are overlaid or transplanted and it says so. Flat PDFs are recreated as HTML before signing.