Hi, It was dsaks who originally asking about creating a digital signature and that's what the core of this thread is about. When Mobius Strip asked about flattening the signature into a bitmap image that I suggested using a custom signature appearance, because the progenitor of the thread was asking about digital signatures. If they can get by with using a custom stamp then that's fine by me, but that wasn't the thread topic. On to your questions: mrtoner wrote: I understand why Adobe won't (if that's the case) license the digital signatures ability so that Preview and other applications can use it. However, it should be trivial to allow that wet ink signature appear in other apps and I don't see a compelling reason to prevent it -- afer all, it's not a digital signature. There is no licensing involved here. The PDF specification is public and the Acrobat SDK even has an example of how to create your own signature plug-in. When it comes to the actual cryptographic operations we license the software from RSA. As far as how the signature is created, and how it should be processed, that's all covered by public facing documentation. In fact, Apple is more than capable of processing signatures using their Keychain utility, it's just that they have elected not to include that functionality into Preview. If your job is to monitor this forum and assist users, why couldn't you manage to suggest that the other users use the stamps feature, since it was clear that what they were wanting was only the signature image? These folks are spending hundreds and thousands of dollars on your products and they deserve better than this. It's not my job to monitor the forum. I chime in on digital signature issues because it's a complex subject and there are so few people who understand the minutia of how they work. If dsaks hadn't added "certify with visible signature," to the original post I would have skip this completely, but he/she did so I tried to answer their question. Finally, it's a bit disingenuous when you stated "The image does not display at all, except in Acrobat/Acrobat Reader". It just doesn't display in the free Mac Preview app. There are other third party signature handlers that will process and display a digital signature in a PDF file, but there are not a lot of them in free PDF viewers. As I said above, if dsaks can get by with a custom stamp then great, but if he/she needs a cryptographically sound digital signature then there is no reason why not to created it because everyone can get the free Reader for the Mac, Windows and Linux platforms. Steve
... View more