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Comment by pmiller2 | Hacker News Reader

What do you mean "required"? Like, they wouldn't accept a clean, non-scanned copy? That's absurd.

Some types of documents/deeds do require "wet ink" signatures by law - https://www.lawsociety.org.uk/support-services/advice/articl...

7 years of being a digital nomad, and signing every document digitally, and I never ran into this. TIL.

Unless there is a serious challenge to the contract no one cares. You obviously are okay with the contract and are signing it (if only in an obfuscated, non-physical sense), and they're just looking for a signature that could be kinda real -- if you're good with the deal, and they're good, who cares?

But scanning these documents defeats the point. The law isn't saying "it must be signed with wet ink, but after that a scanned copy is sufficient", it says you need the actual paper with the wet ink signature.

> If you’re a solicitor responsible for registration, you need the other parties' solicitors, on closing, to send you the wet-ink signed parts of the documents. You’ll only proceed when you have the wet-ink signed documents, not when you have seen electronic images of them.

I usually sign documents on my iPad but in this case they told me the signature had to be from a pen. COVID and everything means I don't have a printer nor a scanner at home so I developed this to "scan my iPad signed documents" worked like a charm!

As a technological toy, I think this sort of thing is cool. In fact, you can do it in LaTeX pretty easily: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/94523/simulate-a-sca...

It's interesting that the problem they had was with the signature. You can very easily make a handwritten signature on an iPad. I don't see how there's any practical way to tell the difference between a high-quality, handwritten signature done on an iPad with either a finger or an Apple Pencil and a scanned signature done with a pen.

Are you sure that's not just some excuse they gave you?

> you can do it in LaTeX pretty easily: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/94523/simulate-a-sca...

Ironically, despite being hosted on tex.stackexchange.com, all of the answers use ImageMagick, Photoshop, or Windows 10/Adobe Acrobat.

Interestingly, there are LaTeX packages for coffee stains[1] and to simulate the variability of an actual typewriter[2]. I suppose both of these involve discrete objects (the coffee stain, individual characters) and photocopy/scan effects involve 'fuzzing' of the whole image, rather than any particular element, and TeX isn't really set up for the former.

[1] http://hanno-rein.de/archives/349

[2] http://mirrors.concertpass.com/tex-archive/macros/luatex/lat...

What do you use to sign PDFs on your iPad?

I just use my regular Good Notes 5 app and then export back the PDF

Banks that need monthly financials to assure regulators that they are servicing their loans are also required to justify the documents to the regulator. If you just autogenerated it perhaps they’re wrong or falsified. While if you have to take out a pen and sign them that won’t happen.

Yes, absurd.

That's beyond absurd. The content of the document is what determines whether it's falsified or not, and you can inspect the content for inconsistencies on a generated PDF far more easily than a scanned one.

In this case I think it’s the business auditors (pwc etc) assuring “best practices” that will satisfy the regulators and thus the regulatory auditors (Federal reserve, treasury, FDIC...).

Banks are themselves full of absurd practices but in this one tiny area I’d give them a pass.

Yes, this is a lawyers version of a patch to fix bugs that programmers sometimes introduce.

A couple of years ago I used DocuSign on a contract, and the PDF “copy” I was emailed as a receipt had different terms than the one I actually signed.

Luckily I did not object to the discrepancy, but I would have wondered what would have actually happened if I did.

What?? Is this public? Have others reported this happening? That would be a huge issue!

Let me clarify by stating that I am not necessarily claiming that there is/was a software issue with DocuSign. There are also some big procedural differences between signing a hard copy and the way most electronic signature systems work. I could have been fooled by the user.

Regardless, I am sure there has been a version of a some document signing software somewhere that had a bug with immutability. Now paper documents aren't immutable either, but you couldn't accidentally change one with a bad where clause in a SQL statement, and casual attempts will leave evidence of the change.

> Now paper documents aren't immutable either...

BTW this is why numbers in contracts are often written “1 (one)”: because in the age of pens it was easy to change “1” to “10” or “4” or “one” to “none”

Also why checks do this — checks are actually simply contracts, which were standardized in the US a bit in the 1920s (you’d get a check form, fill in your name and the bank name, then the amounts, etc; current check design With preprinted bank info dates back I believe to the late 1960s.

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