How to create a "Date Received" stamp that cannot be removed

[jasonj41770420]

I work in government, and we are trying to make our office as paperless as possible.  One important function that we did without trouble in our paper-based system was to stamp documents with a "date received" when they were turned into our office.

Our standard 'date received' stamp has our jurisdiction name, our department name, and a date.

We are using Adobe Acrobat Pro DC 2015 Release (Classic) version 2015.006.30418

I can successfully create a dynamic stamp in the "comment" tool set, and I have successfully created and applied a dynamic stamp to our documents, complete with a date that changes automatically, so each time the stamp is used, it puts the correct date into the stamp.

However, this stamp, and indeed, *all* stamps in Acrobat Pro DC appear to be completely useless due to an inability to secure or lock these stamps down once they are applied!  This is really strange, since Acrobat is supposed to generally "simulate" paper in the digital realm, and there is no easy way to make an ink stamp just vanish off of real paper.  Adobe engineers, however, seem to have decided that all people must in all cases have the ability to delete any stamp from any document at any time, even if the document is otherwise password protected to prevent editing!

I can password protect a .PDF, and prevent most edits to it.  However, a password protected .PDF document can still have any and all 'comments,' including but not limited to dynamic stamps, deleted by *any* user, regardless of password protection.

Making stamps "vanish" at will is obviously not at all equivalent in function or security to the behavior of a real ink stamp in the real world on real paper.  In fact, this functionality choice from Adobe is so strange I'd say that the 'stamp' tool is actually misnamed... It doesn't behave like a real stamp at all!

How do I create a stamp in a .PDF that cannot be removed by anyone, or that cannot be removed by anyone unless a password is provided for the document?

[try67]

You can't prevent someone willing enough from editing the file. You can, however, prove that a file has been edited.

To do that you should digitally sign it. Editing the file in any way (except those allowed, like editing the values of form fields, for example), will invalidate the signature.

You can also flatten the file before signing it, converting the comments to static contents and making sure they are included in the signature's "signature" of the file.

[Document Geek]

Here is a link containing the flattener script: Document Geek: Flattenizer Script for Adobe PDFs