New Feature Announcement: Support for Digital Signatures

We’re excited to announce that the Adobe PDF Library now supports digital signatures, offering users a secure and flexible way to sign PDF documents programmatically. 

With this new capability, developers can integrate digital signing workflows directly into their applications. This feature includes customizable signature appearances that can display a variety of signer attributes such as name, location, date/time, reason for signing, organization contact information, and certificate details. You can also include logos or images in the signature field—and there's full support for Unicode characters, ensuring global language compatibility. Here's an example:

Credential Support

The digital signature feature supports multiple credential formats: 

• DER (Distinguished Encoding Rules) 
• PEM (Base64 encoded) 
• PFX/PKCS12 (password-protected certificate bundles) 

Credentials can be accessed either from files (with disk access) or as cached data in memory, providing flexibility for a variety of deployment scenarios. Note that for PFX/PKCS12 and DER formats, user credentials are required to be presented as files only.

More to Come

Currently, the Adobe PDF Library supports CMS (Cryptographic Message Syntax) signatures. Future enhancements are planned to include RFC3161 (TimeStamp Protocol) and CAdES/PAdES standards for expanded signing options. 

This new feature marks a significant step forward in helping developers build secure, compliant, and trusted PDF solutions. Stay tuned for more updates as we continue to enhance our digital signature capabilities!

Check out the release notes (from May 16, 2025)

And check out the code samples on GitHub >> Choose your language >> Click on the Security folder