Adding Electronic Signature / Image to PDF

I am trying to see the best way to incorporate this feature with Aspose and have a Total license.

We are potentially looking to add Electronic Signatures to a PDF we generate from a Word Document, By Electronic signature, I mean either text in a script format or an image that represents a person’s signature. This is similar to what you may see in an Online Mortgage application, where a person clicks on a link, and they see a canned script font of their name.

We still would like to be able to print out the PDF and have the person live sign, so I am thinking we could do this by adding canned text in the word document (like ##MainSignature## ) and during the PDF creation process, we search and replace that text with a named TextBoxField. There potentially may be several of these fields, but they should be identifiable and differentiable (such as a main signature, one for Parent/Guardian, etc.)

So my guess is when we wanted to have a document signed online, we would iterate through these fields, generate the text for each box, and just set a Font Size and Style to emulate a system generated signature.

Alternatively, since this may be tedious to rework old docs, I was thinking we may be able to search and isolate a string of text in the Consent, such as “Participant Name” determine its location, go to that page of the PDF and generate an offset (like 50 or 100 higher and then apply a TextSample in a similar format, or an image stamp, in the case we have generated an image from a TextPad control.

Just trying to see if I am overthinking things, or if their is better functionality built in to Aspose already.

@dlaskey

Your assumptions are correct about achieving the functionality that you require. Signatures on a PDF can be added in more than one way like text stamps, image stamps, etc. In case you already have a marker for a signature like “##MainSignature##”, you can replace it by using TextFragmentAbsorber with simple text OR you can retrieve its location and add text/image stamp instead. In case you face any issues, please feel free to let us know.