Pdf Signed (electronically or by hand)

[Alain24882916cjnu]

Hello,

  Does anyone know how I can lift a signature from a Pdf to transfer it to another document. We are trying to appose all the signatures from different individuals on the final copy of the contract. Since everyone sends its contact signed individually this would help a lot.

Thanks

Alan

[Amal.]

Hi Alan

Hope you are doing well and thanks for reaching out.

We do not have this option to lift a signature from a signed PDF file, so that it can be transferred to another document. as it will invalidate the purposes of the signature.

Regards

Amal

[MikelKlink]

Obviously transfering digital signatures will invalidate them as @Amal. already has said.Thus, I assume you merely are talking about written signature strokes. Even they come in a number of varieties, the most common:

• as a bitmap graphic showing only the stroke;
• as part of a bitmap graphic showing the whole page or a part thereof;
• as a vector graphic showing the stroke.

And all of them may either be used in the page content or in an annotation.

Each of these cases may require a different approach for extraction.

Which cases occur in your context? How faithful shall the transfer be? And what is your toolbox for all this?

[Test Screen Name]

I think even if it is technically possible, such manipulation would be illegal, or at least invalidate the contract, in many countries. People could easily show that your contract did not match their copy of what they signed, opening the accusation of fraud. You should instead make a combined bundle of all signed documents.

[MikelKlink]

Indeed, as far as legality is concerned: Of course, to give the result PDF more value than some scrap paper, you should (before signing!) have told every party of that contract that you were going to collect all the signatures on a single edition of the document; additionally, you should forward a copy of that single edition to all parties for confirmation as soon as it's ready. (And then should keep these conformations for the case of a repudiation attempt.)

Essentially what you are trying to do is a small scale version of Adobe Acrobat Sign or DocuSign parallel signing use cases, but these service providers make everyone accept something like an EULA before participating and have had an army of lawyers and certifying bodies confirm that their service works as advertized.

[Alain24882916cjnu]

Thanks for your answers. Yes 'parallel' is the key. We do send the resulting document, with all the signatures, at t he end of this parallel process.

I am a professor of software engineering and we are building this application for Canadian Lawyers to facilitate their life. Doing the round robin is slower than sending the contract to all and waiting for individual signatures.

I think what is important to note is that not everyone uses electronic signtaures. I received scanned version of the document signed by hand, pictures of the document taken from their phones, etc...

Because we are not living in an ideal world where everyone uses the same technology and way of doing things I need to be able to pick up the signatures in all these situations.

We are almost there now using AI algorithms.

Thank 

People still sign and scan papers you know. We get all sorts of  documents We have partially achieved it using AI and the project continues !

Thanks

[MikelKlink]

If your application is to be used at large scale, consider a Common Criteria (or similar) evaluation and certification to test and document its security properties. This may ease acceptance of the application and give you firm ground if ever confronted with fraud accusations or repudiation attempts.

Canada is a Common Criteria certificate authorizing member, so a CC evaluation sounds reasonable.