Digital Signature supporting PDF versions

Digital signature security was introduced with Acrobat 7 and Reader 7 (PDF1.6) - there was a plugin for Acrobat 6 which allowed a signature field to be added to a document, but most people never knew.

Adobe Reader 7 and higher can sign a document provided the PDF has been saved with extended rights using a copy of Acrobat Professional. I'm not sure if iText has the ability to add those special headers to a dynamically-generated document.

Hi UVSAR,

Thanks for your reply.

I didnt get much clarity in the below sentence.

"Adobe Reader 7 and higher can sign a document provided the PDF has been saved with extended rights using a copy of Acrobat Professional."

Do you mean the user need to install Adobe Reader 7 with some plugins or ???. Do you have any idea like what are the version to be downloaded from Adobe for this so that i can requrest my network guys to get this version. Right now, we are not able to sign with Adobe Reader 8. But can with Adobe Acrobat 9 Standard.

Thanks in advance for your reply.

Thanks
Pardha

To enable a PDF to be signed in Adobe Reader, it must first be opened and saved using a copy of Acrobat Professional - in Pro there is a menu entry "extend features in Reader" that allows Reader permission to do "editing" tasks such as commenting, signing and filling in form fields.

Just to clarify things a bit, digital signatures have been around since Acrobat 4, but with version 4.x and 5.x you could only sign using a digital ID that was generated from within Acrobat (aka a self-signed digital ID). Beginning with Acrobat 6 you could sign with a digital ID that was issued by a Certificate Authority (CA) and you were no longer restricted to Acrobat generated digital IDs, although they still worked. Version 6 only supported CRLs for getting revocation information and version 7 introduced OCSP revocation info along with time stamping. In version 8 we added support for more digest methods.

So far all I've touched on is signing in Acrobat, but what about signing in the free Adobe Reader? Beginning with Reader version 5.1 we add the ability to sign provided the PDF file was imbued with special privileges known as Reader Rights. In the early days the only way to add these rights to a PDF was via a Rights Extension server, which still exists today as one of our LiveCycle server products. If you need to Reader Enable (add Reader Rights) thousands of documents (e.g. what the IRS does with their downloadable forms) you would want to procure the server software.

As UVSAR mention you can also add Reader Enable a PDF file using Acrobat Pro or Acrobat Pro Extended (but not Acrobat Standard). This functionality was added to Acrobat 8 and is still in Acrobat 9 today. If you only need to Reader Enable a few files then procuring Acrobat would be the way to go.

I hope this helps,
Steve