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Comment by spapas82 | Hacker News Reader

For a project that you can use to actually sign (electronically of course) a PDF file or verify that a PDF file has a proper signature take a look a this:

https://github.com/spapas/pdf-sign-check

It uses org.bouncycastle and apache pdfbox and is completely open source. I'd be happy to help anybody that wants to use it in his organization!

We use it sucessfully in my organization (public sector in Greece) for some years; notice that to be able to sign you need to have a proper certificate for your organization.

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Nice, but from my experience people don't know digitally signed PDF. They want paper with wet signatures or looking like wet signatures. On the other end of the scale I have seen pdfs signed with self created certificates or signed by mouse movement.

Yes, and in some contexts people seem to recognize digitally signed PDFs only when they “officially” processed by DocuSign, HelloSign, or a similar professional service.

Well it depends on the laws of each country. In my country (Greece) a digitally signed document is acceptable everywhere at least in the public sector. Actually it's illegal for a public servant to deny a digitally signed document!

No professional service is really needed to sign a document; it all depends on the acceptance of the certificate you use for signing by your government/laws. I.e you may need to buy a certificate from a trusted organization or you may need to generate a certificate from a public sector organization of your country.

This is actually an EU reglament, furthermore your Greek digital certificate should work everywhere in the EU! :) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/EIDAS

While eIDAS is absolutely stupid in how it defines electronic signatures (based on the wording, adding a picture of your signature would suffice), QES is not just any digital signature, as it needs to be coming from a certificate that's issued by a recognized CA and must be in a device that doesn't allow exporting the key.

Other than that, it's awesome not having to deal with this crap, though, public notaries are very unimpressed by this stuff.

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