It even includes the option to visualize the signature once (on a particular page). It includes the signing functionality out of the box – just check the PAdESService or the PDFBoxSignatureService. Deploy the demo application, use only the libraries, whatever. It’s open source, you can use at any way you like. I have to introduce here DSS – a wonderful set of components by the European Commission that can be used to sign and validate all sorts of electronic signatures. Therefore one has to add other types of annotations that look like a signature box and when clicked open the signature panel (just like an actual signature box). But, again, people are used to signing all pages, so they’d prefer the electronic signature to be visible on all pages.Īnd that makes the task tricky – PDF is good with having a digital signature box on the last page, but having multiple such boxes doesn’t work well. So having the signature just on the last page is okay. Yes, an electronic document doesn’t have pages – it’s a stream of bytes. Now, notice that I wrote “pages”, on “page”. Why is that? Because people are used to seeing signatures on pages and some may insist on having the signature visible (true story – I’ve got a comment that a detached signature “is not a REAL electronic signature, because it’s not visible on the page”). Second, you may want to actually display the signature on the pages, rather than have the PDF reader recognize it and show it in some side-panel. any electronic data applied to other data can be seen as an electronic signature, where a digital signature is the PKI-based signature). So, what is the usecase – first, you have to electronically sign the PDF with an a digital signature (the legal term is “electronic signature”, so I’ll use them interchangeably, although they don’t fully match – e.g.
However, I’ll write it for two reasons – first, I think it will be very useful for those few who actually need it, and second, I think it will become more and more common as the eIDAS regulation gain popularity – it basically says that electronic signatures are recognized everywhere in Europe (now, it’s not exactly true, because of some boring legal details, but anyway). Electronically signing PDFs is far from a mainstream usecase. I’m aware this is going to be a very niche topic.
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