Ho do I remove a digital signature field, that cannot be found, in Adobe Acrobat Pro XI?

[Blue_Ribbon_Pet]

The wierdest thing happend and I have no explanation. I have been working on a file all week, opened it, closed it, printed it multiple times, and only today did a mysterious problem appear. Upon opening the file for the 20th or so time, an alert appeard at the top of the PDF doc saying: (on left side) "Signature field(s) detected" - (on right side) "Open Sign Pane.".

I am running on Windows 7 Professionsl. I read a few suggestions in this community board and after trying everything to remove this mystery signature field, it keeps saying cannot find any fields. WTH? I never added any, the file WAS fine, and all of a sudden this happens? The kicker is; that I re-printed to PDF from the original Filemaker file as I have done dozens of times without this problem, after deleting the corrupted file, and the same thing happened.

Anyone have any ideas how to get rid of this non-existing digital signature field that apparently exists???

**UPDATE** It now seems that ALL NEW PDF documents I am creating today are adding a digital signature field that I am NOT adding it myslef. I just chose: print to Adobe PDF to some new docs and it happened to each of them, the same green pop-up upon opening the docs; as stated above: (on left side) "Signature field(s) detected" - (on right side) "Open Sign Pane."

Now another thing I noticed is that it did not happen earlier this morning (same computer) because I went back and opened them and they are fine, no pop-up about signature detected, it is only happening since a couple of hours ago on all my new docs... I am very frustrated. I even contacted Adobe Echosign, and they have created a ticket for me...waiting to hear from them.

Message was edited by: Blue Ribbon Pet

[try67]

Some time ago I added instructions for Mac users. It's more complex, but the reports I got so far were that it works... See my website for the details.

[DavidB3]

Gilad D (try67) wrote:

Some time ago I added instructions for Mac users. It's more complex, but the reports I got so far were that it works... See my website for the details.

What is the URL of your website?

Thank you,

David

[try67]

This post on my website can be found here: http://try67.blogspot.com/2013/05/acrobatreader-disable-sign-pane.html

There's also a link there to the instruction page Adobe created themselves, after I published my post.

[DavidB3]

Gilad D (try67) wrote:

This post on my website can be found here: http://try67.blogspot.com/2013/05/acrobatreader-disable-sign-pane.html

There's also a link there to the instruction page Adobe created themselves, after I published my post.

Thank you for the info. I had misread the Adobe instructions when I first looked at them, but I followed them this time and it seems to have fixed the problem.

Now I can send PDF invoices that contain the word "sign" (as in signage) without making clients think they somehow have to sign them. What an annoying feature, especially without a Preference to deactivate it.

[Dave Merchant]

NO, this only applies to you. Changing a registry or plist entry has no effect on the other recipients of a document and at this time there's no header variable you can set in the PDF file to tell a remote viewer that it shouldn't parse the content for keywords. Indeed as a document author you should always keep the DMB enabled, as you need to see what your recipients will experience with their default installations.

If you want to hide the EchoSign DMB for everyone viewing a particular file, apply permissions security so that editing is disabled. If the file can't be changed, it can't have a signature added - and the Acrobat Family knows not to bother asking. Same is true with PDF/A files since they're treated as read-only.

Where security isn't an option some people are adding characters to the "keywords" then making them invisible; though a hairline space within the word is easier and won't annoy a RIP. If it's a headline where the extra gap is very obvious, either set the hairline character's width to 1% or negative-kern the next glyph. All this will of course prevent a regular Ctrl-F search from finding the word too.

The detection system is not just looking for keywords as the help file implies; it's more complicated than that. You can sometimes create a PDF spattered with the words "sign, sign here, signed by..." and it will be ignored, other times one stray mention of "warning signs" will trigger the DMB. Engineering won't reveal the algorithm to the public but we all know it's faulty. Hopefully in future we can get a boolean added to the Document Information schema that disables the parser, but it's a fight to convince Adobe that their in-app promotions for subscription services could possibly be a bad thing. The more feature requests you make, the better!

DavidB3 wrote:

Now I can send PDF invoices that contain the word "sign" (as in signage) without making clients think they somehow have to sign them. What an annoying feature, especially without a Preference to deactivate it.

[BradMacPro]

Applying a password, making it a secure document works. Locking the file in the Mac's Finder is not enough.

[CMJRoss]

OMG - I thought I was going to lose my freakin' mind!!! I work in commercial real estate, and the word "sign" shows up all over the place! Bye-bye green banner!!

[Camst4]

Had this happen today exporting from Indesign CC - upgraded only a week ago.

I found the problem was just 1 Illustrator file. Saving as an eps, or back saving (then re-saving) as CS5 didn't work either.

In the end I just rasterized it to convert to a PSD.

[Guest]

New Feature came in the last update.

Here is the reference material to disable it:

Signing with EchoSign

These preferences allow IT to remove signing options from the product's user interface.

http://www.adobe.com/devnet-docs/acrobatetk/tools/PrefRef/Windows/FeatureLockdown.html?zoom_highligh...

Summary table

bEnableEchoSignDetection	Displays the Document Message Bar when a blank signature field is detected.
bEnableFillSig	Specifies whether to remove the Sign Now panel from the Sign Pane.
bEnableSignPane	Specifies whether to remove the Sign task pane button from the toolbar.

bEnableEchoSignDetection

Top>FeatureLockdown>Signing with EchoSign>bEnableEchoSignDetection
Data type	boolean: DWORD value > REG_DWORD
Default	1
Version #	11.0.03
Lock Path	HKLM\SOFTWARE\Policies\Adobe\(product name)\(version)\FeatureLockdown\cServices
Summary	Displays the Document Message Bar when a blank signature field is detected.
Details	When enabled, the product tries to detect if a document may need to be signed. If the words "Sign" or "Signature" are detected next to any line, a document message bar appears with an "Open Sign Pane" button. Possible values include: 0: Don't detect signature fields. 1: Do detect signature fields.