Digitally signing a Password Protected PDF

Forum|Forum|4 years ago
January 12, 2022
2 replies
316 views

I need to be able to apply Digital Signatures using the "Certificates" menu in Adobe Acrobat Reader DC, to PDFs created with password protection, to prevent content changes being made.

The security settings of the PDFs are set to allow signing but the "Digitally Sign" option is greyed out.

Other PDF software allows certificate digital signatures to be applied to the same PDFs.

How can we allow fully certified signatures to be applied using Adobe Acrobat Reader, and prevent changes being made?

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Yes, Acrobat (paid for) is required to allow or perform "unprepared" signing. This is no accident, Adobe use Reader to promote and sell Acrobat.

Bernd Alheit

Community Expert

Add a signature field before you protect the document.

B

Becky22618188zp28Author

Participant

Hi Bernd,

The protected PDFs are produced in bulk from MS Word. Is there a way to add the signature field into the Word copy first so that it's in place when the PDF is created? We need to avoid having to manually make changes in each PDF as this would be very time consuming.

I'm assuming too that adding a signature field into the PDF requires DC Pro?

Thank you

try67

Community Expert

> Is there a way to add the signature field into the Word copy first so that it's in place when the PDF is created?

Not if you use Adobe's PDF Maker plugin or the Adobe PDF printer.

However, you don't have to do it manually. An Action in Acrobat Pro can be used to add the signature field, sign the file, apply a security policy and then save it, and it can be run on multiple files.

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