PDF Signature Appearances

When signing PDF documents, you have the option to create visible signature appearances. These appearances can display images like hand signatures, logos, and details about the signing process, such as who signed it, why, and when. This feature is valuable for helping users trust and understand digital signatures, and it remains visible even when documents are printed.

The ADSS Signing Service offers a PDF signature appearance designer, allowing users to create various standard signature appearances. These can then be used in signing profiles or requests. Users can define signature attributes like the reason for signing, location, contact details, and signing date/time. They also have control over the font style, color, size, and placement of these text elements within the signature field. Additionally, images such as company logos and hand-signatures can be incorporated into the signature appearance.

Clicking on the PDF Signature Appearances shows the following screen:

A list of existing PDF signature appearances is shown. The table below explains the various options:

Items	Description
Appearance Name	A friendly name assigned to this PDF Signature appearance for easy identification purposes.
Description	A description for this appearance (optional). Its useful to record who owns this, which applications it is associated with, etc.
Preview	Clicking on the button will display the preview of the signature appearance.
New	Creates a new appearance - explained further below.
View	Clicking on the button will enable the user to view the signature appearance.
View Appearance	Clicking on the button will enable the user to view the details of signature appearance, including signed by, signing date, reason, location, and contact information.
Edit	Allows an existing appearance to be modified.
Make a Copy	This is very useful when making a copy of an existing profile should be used as the base to create a new profile. The copy cannot have the same name or description as of the base profile.
Import	Click on the Import button to import the PDF Signature Appearance file from the file system.
Delete	Deletes the selected appearance.
Preview	Click the “View” link to see how this signature appearance will look when added to a PDF document.
Export	Click the “Export” button to export the relevant signature appearance settings out of ADSS Server. This can be used to export an appearance to SigningHub.
Search	Click on this button to see different search options. This is useful if there are a lot of PDF signature appearances and you need to search for a particular one.
Clear Search	Click on this button any time to discard the search results and see full list of PDF signature appearances.

Existing PDF signature appearances can be sorted in either Ascending or Descending order by selecting a table column from the drop down list. The list of PDF signature appearances can be sorted by Name or Description.

Clicking on the View Appearance button will display the following screen:

It allows the user to view the signature appearance details like signed by, signing date, reason, location, and contact information

Clicking on the Import button will display the following screen:

It will allow the user to import PDF Signature Appearance file from the file system.

Clicking on the Advance Search button on PDF Signature Appearance main page will display following screen:

This helps to locate a particular PDF signature appearances. The PDF signature appearance can be searched based on "Signature Appearance Name". If a search is based on multiple values, then these will be combined together using the “AND” operand, and thus only records that meet all the criteria will be presented.

Click on the New button to create a new signature appearance, the following screen is shown:

The table below explains various items on this page:

Items	Description
Appearance Name	Assigns a friendly name to this PDF Signature appearance for identification purposes.
Appearance Description	Allows the user to identity why this signature appearance exists, which applications use it, who should be consulted about it, etc.
Manage Appearance Objects	The following signature appearance objects can be added, removed or modified in this section: Signed By Signing Date Reason Location Contact Info Hand Signature Company Logo Border Note: Hand-signature and company logo images can be resized by using the mouse to click and select the lower right re-size pointer and moving this to re-size the image as required. For Signing date the following date formats are available: EU Date. US Date. Full Date. Short Date. Short US Date. ISO 8601 Date.
Appearance Object Details	For each above mentioned appearance object you can define these details: Include Labels Font Type Font Size Font Color Include Labels: Enable this check box if it is required to add label with the appearance object e.g. if Signed By appearance object is selected then user can enable the include label check box and add the Label name e.g. "Signer". Font Type: Select the Font type for each signature appearance object from options: Arial Lucida Sans Unicode Verdana Tahoma Susie’s Hand Tahoma Bold If it is required to use other than default available fonts in the signature appearance profile then: Either place the required font in the ADSS Server default font directory: [ADSS Server Installation Directory]/fonts Or you can change the default font directory to point to any other directory on the ADSS Server machine by following these instructions: Go Go to location: [ADSS Server Installation Directory]/conf Edit Edit the system.properties file Search for the parameter DEFAULT_FONTS_DIRECTORY You can change this value to point to any directory on the ADSS Server machine Save the changes Restart the ADSS Console and Service instances from Windows NT Services panel or UNIX daemon in order to have the changes into effect. Font Size: Select the Font Size for each signature appearance object Font Color: Click on the Font Color to select a suitable color: