New Standard For EU-Compliant Electronic Signatures

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)."

Comments

Re:Adobe Lobby machine

[Yer Mum]

But unless alternative PDF readers can verify electronic signatures, they'll be useless. And more importantly, unless alternative PDF writers can generate electronic signatures, they'll be useless. That's where the money is.

OS Implementation?

[CarpetShark]

Anyone know if this will be implementable in free software? Are there patent/copyright issues?

Re:Adobe Lobby machine

[TheRaven64]

Yes, I found this a good reason to switch away from Adobe Reader; Apple's Preview (as well as being faster) lets me annotate any PDF. My workflow involves a lot of PDFs and no Adobe products at all. I generate images in PDF format from a variety of tools (GraphVis, OmniOutliner, GNUplot, and so on), incorporate them into documents using pdflatex and send them to my publisher. They annotate them and send them back, whereupon I review the annotations in Preview, make changes to the LaTeX source and then send them the final result for publication.