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petera7999002
petera7999002
Participant
March 2, 2022
Answered

Removing/covering signature information in PDF/A

  • March 2, 2022
  • 3 replies
  • 610 views

We have a third party e-signature solution creating PDF/A documents with certificate containing personal data attached. In some cases we publish these documents on our external web and do not want to show the personal data (name, etc) of the persons signing. We initially solved this by making a copy with "Print to PDF", however this also removed other meta data e.g. the indexing in the TOC, which is very useful in large documents.

Is there a way of removing or covering only the personal data in the certificate, keeping the indexing in the TOC?

Thanks in advance,

Peter

This topic has been closed for replies.
Correct answer MikelKlink

  Depending on how that third-party applies those signatures, there might be a way to remove them.

  You speak about e-signatures and certificates. Do you by chance mean X.509 certificates and digital signatures based on those X.509 certificates? Many digital signing application always apply the signature in a final incremental update of its own. If that's the case for your documents, you can simply cut off that final incremental update and get an unsigned version of the document. This cutting off is not an Acrobat Reader feature but can be done using standard utilities.

3 replies

MikelKlink
MikelKlinkCorrect answer
Participating Frequently
March 2, 2022

  Depending on how that third-party applies those signatures, there might be a way to remove them.

  You speak about e-signatures and certificates. Do you by chance mean X.509 certificates and digital signatures based on those X.509 certificates? Many digital signing application always apply the signature in a final incremental update of its own. If that's the case for your documents, you can simply cut off that final incremental update and get an unsigned version of the document. This cutting off is not an Acrobat Reader feature but can be done using standard utilities.

petera7999002
petera7999002Author
Participant
March 7, 2022

Thanks @MikelKlink. This solved the problem and you just made the life easier for a large number of people 🙂

 

Bernd Alheit
Community Expert
Bernd AlheitCommunity Expert
Community Expert
March 2, 2022

Not possible with Acrobat Reader.

T
Test Screen Name
Legend
March 2, 2022

Use the Redaction function in Acrobat Pro. This - like all edits - will also destroy the PDF/A status and you will need to put this back when finished. This will remove page content, but not e-signing certificates; these are not designed to be removed. Redact before signing, or don't sign.

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