CCSI delivers network and technology solutions for small- to medium-sized businesses around the Vancouver/Portland area.
Looking for more PC tips and technology updates? Check out our blog. It’s that easy! You can also perform this process from your smart phone using the desktop view, however, it’s a bit of a hassle, so it’s best if you can get to a desktop or laptop computer. You can save your changes on the Google Docs drive, or you can also choose to download and safe the file back onto your computer as a word processing document to edit and save as you please.Once the file is uploaded, in the main view, right click on the file and select “Open with”, and then “Google Docs.” A new tab will open in your browser with editable content.This will complete your document and allow you to email and download it.
After adding everything you need to your PDF document, press Send in the top right corner. You can also add text, check marks for check boxes, and dates. This is where you can create and add your digital signature to your PDF document. The next page will be the document editor.
If you don’t, you can sign up for one for free.
How to Edit a PDF Without Adobe Acrobatįirst, you’ll need to have a google account, which most people do. It’s through Google Docs and here’s how you do it. There is an easy and FREE way to edit a PDF without Adobe Acrobat.
There may be times, however, when you want to edit a PDF without Adobe Acrobat because you don’t own a license to use the full version. The advantage of using an Adobe tool or DocuSign is they provide an image for you automatically when you sign the PDF.PDF files are an essential part of doing digital business.
This is fine, of course, but in my opinion it would be nice for the end-user to have a visual representation of the signature.
It has been signed and can be verified, but the signature has just been applied in code but there’s nothing visual to show that the PDF has been signed. But there is a slight problem, the signed PDF document will look exactly the same as it did before it was signed. Now the next step is simple, just replacing the placeholder with the actual signature, and replacing placeholder ByteRange values with the real ones (simple, because of node-signpdf). Together these three items form the signature value. The timestamp is pretty self-explanatory. This is needed so that if the document is altered after it has been signed, then the signature will be invalid. Wondering how to sign a pdf without wasting time and paper No need to print - use our free tool to add a signature to PDF files in seconds. Hashing in cryptography is a bit like summarising the whole PDF in a short string of text. The document digest is a hashed version of the document in the state it is before it is signed. So a hacker can’t pretend they’re someone else, for example Google, and sign a document on behalf of them. It can only be purchased by a Certificate Authority (like GlobalSign or Entrust) who need to verify you. The certificate is a cryptographic file that digitally proves you are who you say you are. Of course, node-signpdf takes care of all the complicated bits shown in the image below, but I’ll give a quick high-level run-through. With the placeholder signature in place, we can go ahead with generating the actual signature. This information will be placed in the PDF as bytecode with empty bytes for where the signature should go. It needs the signature length (which is a fixed byte size usually 3322), a ByteRange placeholder (more about this in the next section), and the current date, the value of the other fields are less important.
Luckily node-signpdf provides useful helpers to be able to create this placeholder and they seem to have favoured PDFKit over other PDF creation tools in their examples, but I favour a library called pdf-lib.js which is able to manipulate more modern PDFs, for now, we will look at their PDFKit example.Īs seen in this code block the placeholder is not completely blank and will require some useful information from the signer. Adding a PDF signature placeholderĪ fair question to ask would be, why do we need to add a placeholder before adding the signature? From what I can see, it’s a way to quickly identify what part of the document needs the signature without any complex calculations. It’s an open-source package under the MIT license but it’s unique in the sense that the authors are happy for you to just take their code and put it in your project without installing the package, which is helpful to pick and choose only the bits we need resulting in a leaner codebase overall. The hard part of the signing will be done by a library called node-signpdf. There are the steps needed to sign a PDF programmatically are as follows: