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Problem viewing signatures with docusign and authentisign

Forum|Forum|10 months ago
March 25, 2025
3 replies
5101 views

Hi
I am a Realtor. I use Docusign through Keller Williams command. When I send documents that are signed to the other Realtor and they use Authentisign to sign the documents, I cannot view their signatures. however, when I upload them into docusign, I can see them. The problem seems to be with Adobe. I have Adobe Professional. I attached an example of what is happening.

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

No_signature_shown.pdf

Correct answer MikelKlink

I contact Docusign, Authentisign and Adobe. Docusign said it wasn't their problem. Authentisign tried to help and said to flatten the document by printing in the chrome browser to pdf. Adobe more or less said the same thing--they said that hopefully there would be a fix for it.

My files are below.

Thanks for sharing those additional files. They confirmed what I had assumed. The Authentisign signature form field flattening code is buggy and creates the broken content.

So

Docusign said it wasn't their problem.

That's right. Their output is ok.

Authentisign tried to help and said to flatten the document by printing in the chrome browser to pdf.

Well, as their code damages the PDF, real help would be fixing their code for flattening signature widgets.

Of course you can work around their bug by completely removing or flattening the Docusign signature before forwarding your documents to the next signer. But the next signer may also be bewildered by the missing digital signature...

So that manual flattening approach merely would be a work-around while waiting for the Authentisign fix.

K

kelli_0058

New Participant

I am having the same problem now. I've been using Docusign for 15 years and never seen this happen. I can open the signed PDF document emailed from the other Realtor on my phone and the signatures and initials appear but when I open the emailed document on my PC, they are not there. It's an Adobe issue if I can open it and see it correctly on my phone and not on Adobe Acrobat on my laptop. This is a problem!

MikelKlink

Participating Frequently

It's an Adobe issue if I can open it and see it correctly on my phone and not on Adobe Acrobat on my laptop. This is a problem!

Nope. Well, yes, it's a problem, but not an Adobe issue.

The PDFs simply are broken. Well, at least the example file shared by Tamara is, see the content stream except i quoted in another comment. Some viewers may guess and display what was intended, but in particular signed documents shouldn't need to rely on correct guesswork to show as intended.

K

kelli_0058

New Participant

Thank you! I couldn't get it to work after downloading that print production flattening tool but I'm not the one who had the document signed...another Realtor did and sent it to me. So I printed it from my phone where it showed the signatures, and scanned the pages to the computer. Old school solutions. LOL Where there's a will, there's a way. Now I know this happens though so when someone sends me an "unsigned" document - I won't think they're an idiot. I'll check it on my phone 1st!!

I

Ismail_Ahmed7882

New Participant

It sounds like the issue might be related to how Authentisign applies signatures and how Adobe renders them. Try the following:

Open the document in Adobe Reader instead of Adobe Pro to check if the signatures appear.

Ensure "Show Hidden Annotations" is enabled in Adobe.

Try flattening the PDF by printing it to PDF before sending.

Check if Authentisign uses layered or XFA-based PDFs, which may not display correctly in some viewers.

tameraj78725492Author

Known Participant

I will try these--but you can't edit a signed document, so I don't think it will let me print to pdf or flatten.

See attached. I sent myself a document from docusign, signed it, then sent to authentisign and signed it. It view correclty in docusign, in the adobe viewer on my browser, but not in adobe desktop. I have tried this on two different computers using two different adobe pro accounts. The Test Account signature is from Docusign, the Tamera Johnson signature is from Authentisign.

Adobe_Test_for_forum.pdf

Adobe_Test_both_signatures.pdf

MikelKlink

Participating Frequently

The error that makes Acrobat stop processing the page content streams and, therefore, not display the Authentisign additions, is quickly found: There is a cm (concatenate to transformation matrix) instruction with 4 of its 6 numeric parameters replaced by a "NaN" expression. This is invalid in PDFs.

Furthermore, the effect of the cm instruction is to transform (scale/rotate/skew/translate) everything drawn thereafter in a way specified by those numbers. Thus, a responsible PDF viewer should stop here, inform the user about a non-recoverable error in the content stream, and not display the page at all, in particular in a signed document. Apparently, though, none of the viewers tested here handles this responsibly but instead each of them does display the page one way or another.

The reason why the non-Acrobat viewers' apparent strategy of simply ignoring the issue works well here, is that after the transformation matrix change until its revocation by a restore-graphics-state instruction in a complicated way nothing is drawn. (I'm sure, though, that those viewers didn't check whether this is the case...)

You only shared the final file of your example signing round trip, so I cannot be sure which software caused this. I assume, though, that Authentisign is the culprit.

I assume so because this faulty cm instruction is between the additions by Docusign and those by Authentisign, and the content that is manipulated by it looks like a flattened widget annotation with a width and height of 0.

This quite likely was the widget of the invisible (0x0) digital signature Docusign eventually applied. Authentisign needed to remove that digital signature, otherwise its changes to the document would have been disallowed altogether. To keep the visual appearance of digital signatures on the page after removal, Authentisign flattened the signature widget (i.e. tranformed it from an annotation into additional page content). Unfortunately, while doing so it didn't properly check the dimensions of the widget and blissfully divided by 0, getting NaN (Not-a-Number) values for the flattening transformation matrix.

You should report this issue to Authentisign.

As mentioned, though, this is only a (very reasonable!) assumption. To be 100% sure I'd need the intermediate file to compare with.

------

Some technical details:

The page object in question is object 6. It has a content stream array with many partial streams. Among them is stream object 25 with this content:

q
1.00 .00 .00 1.00 .00 816.00  cm
q
q
NaN NaN NaN NaN .00 .00  cm
1.00 .00 .00 1.00 .00 -816.00  cm
/e8b64a13-edb0-40e6-8242-3860f5dde0cc Do
Q
Q
Q

The refered-to XObject e8b64a13-edb0-40e6-8242-3860f5dde0cc is in object 76 and has a 0x0 bounding box:

76 0 obj
<<
/Type /XObject
/Subtype /Form
/FormType 1
/Resources <<
/XObject <<
/n2 132 0 R
>>

>>

/BBox [0 0 0 0]
/Matrix [1.00 0 0 1.00 0 0]
/Length 9
>>
stream
™žÔ P„SFZ
endstream
endobj

MikelKlink

Participating Frequently

The problem seems to be with Adobe.

That's unlikely. Whenever Acrobat displays an error message that there is a problem on some page, this usually means that there is an error in the PDF.

The reason why some PDF viewers do display the page as you expect it, is that PDF viewers generally try to fix some errors under the hood without reporting this, and that different viewers fix different sets of errors. Apparently the error in the file in question is fixed by the docusign viewer but not by Acrobat.

Considering, though, that this "fixing" always includes some guessing how the broken PDF actually was meant to look like, different fixing viewers may fix the issue differently. This obviously is critical in particular in case of contracts which should look the same for all parties involved.

That all being said, though, I'm afraid that without analyzing the PDF in question this is pure guesswork. Thus, can you share one such PDF? Maybe you can create some PDF with dummy data and try to recreate the issue together with that other realtor?

tameraj78725492Author

Known Participant

Let me see what I can do. I can send a document to myself with docusign and authentisign. It isn't just this Realtor that I can't see their documents, it has been when docs are signed in authentisign.

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