The ability to digitally sign a pdf when it is generated, thus authenticating who created the doc, would be an excellent feature. What does anyone else think?

Currently Prince 5.0 supports PDF encryption and access rights, which is one component of PDF security.

I understand that there are many different ways of digitally signing PDF files, and the PDF specification even allows for arbitrary digital signature plugins. With that in mind, which method(s) would be most useful for Prince to support?

Are there any existing tools for digitally signing PDF files that could be used as part of a Prince pipeline?

3 years later...

Has any progress been made on this?

Aparently iText (a java library) can add digital signatures to a PDF file. But it's a java library. There is a stand-alone tool (pdftk) that uses the iText library, but the latest version of pdftk is several years old and doesn't support digital signatures.

Any chance that a similar feature could make it into Prince itself? I'm a bit bummed that I only realised I needed this *after* having bought a server license.

No progress, as there hasn't been much demand for it -- as you can see there isn't even a response to this post -- and there has been great demand for many other features.

However, if this feature is important to you, all you need to do is ask for it and we'll take a look. A good place to start is telling us what you need.

Thanks for your reply. All I really need, is a way to guarantee that a PDF generated from my web app, was indeed generated by my web app and not faked by someone else.

I know next to nothing about the PDF signing mechanism so I can't really offer any technical suggestions.

A quick solution would be to generate some unique text in the PDF file, such as a numeric hash of other information in the file. You could make this text the same as color as the background so it is not easily visible, and check for its existence to verify that the PDF file was created by your application.

much later still, but here is someone again really needing digital signing. It might be fine to do the signing externally. I will post my final solution if I find one.

We are in need to prove that our PDF files generated with PrinceXML on our server are really from our company. If there is a possibility to use a certificate like verisign to sign the PDF it would be a great future!

Can I leave a vote for this feature?

Can you give me any tips or pointers to information about this? Is it an Acrobat-specific thing? Does it require a plugin?

Has anyone found a solution combined with PrinceXML to create signed PDFs ?

The UE council now requires for all electronic invoices to be digitally signed using a certificate :
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2010:189:0001:0008:EN:PDF

We would like to provide support for digital signatures, but we have struggled to find requirements for what people actually need, or any good third-party tools that can help.

Hi,

I found something that seems promising enough : http://www.itextpdf.com/

Great, let us know how it goes!

Hi @mikeday,

• about "digital signature", that is official and we need, is this certificate-based-signature. (seems the same/compatible certification method of the cited European requirement).
  
• about "to find requirements for what people actually need", we need to use Prince to sign in template-based signature position (simple placeholder mark for signature). Sign with open-source software, by terminal.
  

Edited 1 Jun 2018 by ppkrauss

Hi @mikeday,

we are talking for a long time know about this feature and I dont want to move over to itextPDF as a solution. Is this in your planning to create a build-in solution in Prince?

Hello.

We use Prince to create ionvoices to suppliers. There is a requirement for invoices to be digitally signed with a certificate.

Please can you inform me if there is a method to do this in prince yet. We need system to do this without user interaction (pdf are created in batch process).

this is important to us - we create many thousands of documents with PRINCE,

Thank you

Dave

Prince cannot sign PDFs yet, no. We hope to add support for this in the future, but currently it requires using another third-party tool.

Hello everyone,

I'd also like to vote for this feature as described from ppkrauss

Is there anything new about this?

Best regards

No not yet.

Being able to apply a Doc MDP signature on a PDF would be a helpful feature for us. We're currently using the secure shell tool from www.pdf-tools.com as a manual command-line process after generation to do that.

Just a vote from me for this feature.

My vote for this feature too.