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New Standard For EU-Compliant Electronic Signatures

Posted by timothy on from the ja-das-war-ich dept.

An anonymous reader writes "ETSI has published a multi-part standard that will facilitate secure paperless business transactions throughout Europe, in conformance with European legislation. The standard defines a series of profiles for PAdES — Advanced Electronic Signatures for PDF documents — that meet the requirements of the European Directive on a Community framework for electronic signatures (Directive 1999/93/EC)."

2 of 42 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Adobe Lobby machine by cbreak · · Score: 4, Informative

    There are many ways to create PDFs and read PDFs without relying on Adobe. Mac OS X offers wide support for this format, every application that can print can create a PDF file. PDFs can be opened with Preview and many other applications understand it.
    LaTeX can create PDF files either directly or with ghostscript, which creates PDFs out of Postcript files.
    Many different libraries exist to create a PDF programmatically.
    Not all implementations might be feature complete, but it's far from being as proprietary as Office from Microsoft.

  2. TS 102 778-x by mrt_2394871 · · Score: 5, Informative

    The European Telecommunications Standards Institute's search page is at:
    http://pda.etsi.org/pda/queryform.asp
    Search for "pades" in the title will get you the five parts of the standard (well, Technical Specification).

    ETSI TS 102 778-x

    And thank goodness it's ETSI doing this, since they publish their standards without charge.