Acrobat Digital Signature API Reference - Adobe Partners

Preface
Digital signatures allow a person to attest to something about a document by signing their
name to it. An Acrobat signature in a document is bound to that document in such a way
that altering the signed document or moving the signature to a different document
invalidates the signature.
A single document may be signed more than once, and changes may occur between
signings. Acrobat’s Digital Signatures links each signature with a particular state of the
document. All changes append the PDF changes to the fully-preserved base PDF
document. The ability to do serial signatures of protected documents is unique to Acrobat,
and draws heavily on the PDF file design for an appended save.
Adobe Acrobat implements digital signatures using plug-ins that can handle both generic
functions common to all digital signatures, and also specific kinds of signatures (signing
methods), such as public-private key (PPK), handwriting, retinal scans, fingerprints, and so
forth.
If you received this technical note without obtaining the entire Acrobat Software
Development Kit (SDK), you can get the complete SDK by visiting:
http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/acrosdk/main.html
What Is in This Document
This document provides a reference for the methods, callbacks declarations and objects
used in creating digital signatures. This document contains separate sections on each:
● Digital Signature Overview provides a general overview of how to work with the digital
signature plug-in.
● PubSec Methods provides detailed descriptions of the methods and structures in the
PubSec access layer, which forms a high-level interface to the digital signature facility.
● PubSec Callbacks provides detailed description of PubSec callback functions, which the
Acrobat viewer and Library use to invoke functionality provided by plug-ins and
applications.
● PubSec Declarations provides detailed descriptions of data declarations used in the
PubSec access layer.
● Digital Signature Methods provides detailed descriptions of each method, including its
parameters and return value.
● Digital Signature Callbacks provides detailed description of callback functions, which
the Acrobat viewer and Library use to invoke functionality provided by plug-ins and
applications.
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