Digitally signing PDF/Office files

[Rich_G]

Welcome beginner. Please answer all of the questions below which may provide information necessary to answer your question.
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Which version of OpenOffice.org are you using? 2.2.1 Build 2.2.0.2
What Operating System (version) are you using? SuSe 10.2
What is your question or comment? I wish to be able to create a digitally signed PDF or M$ Office file from OpenOffice. I can properly sign an OpenOffice document but the signature is stripped when trying to export the file to PDF or not able to sign an M$ Office file. Is there something else I can get which will support this??

Rich

[Phil]

Hi and welcome to the community!

There is no feature to include a digital signature to exported PDF files so far.
Apart from Adobe Acrobat, there a other third-party tools that can do this for you, however most of them are commercial offers.
A Google search for pdf digital* sign* reveals them.

Also digital signatures for MS Office file formats are not supported. However, bear in mind that these file formats are proprietary and thus it would be quite difficult to implement such a feature.

KR, phil

[Rich_G]

Phil,

Thanks for the response. This is what I expected. I fully understand the MS Office issue - and that is why I was hoping this was incorporated into OO. My thoughts were that the LiMux effort (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiMux) or some similar undertaking would have started this.

In business, having the ability to readily and freely digitally sign documents would be a great advantage. For me, it means buying Acrobat for my company for one individual (me). That is not a great expense but it is one. It does not, however, help me on my Linux machines which is a great disappointment. To sign things, I am relegated to Windows which, as an Open Source person (not a developer unfortunately), grates me.

Thanks for the verification though....

Rich G.

[sybille]

Hi,
There is a java library called iText that allows for the PDFs it creates to be digitally signed. I believe it works on Linux.
http://www.lowagie.com/iText/
http://itextpdf.sourceforge.net/howtosign.html

It's a library rather than a stand-alone application, so it's the kind of thing that maybe could be made into a plugin for OOo or another application. Maybe it would be possible to pay someone to program such an application for your business. I don't know, it might be a better investment than paying for proprietary software licensing, but that's something to research.