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I've been needing to sign PDFs lately - fortunately everyone's been fine with me using a self-signed certificate, however I feel it's unprofessional. I'm looking for a personal certificate I can use to sign PDFs and other documents (such as emails).

I saw that GlobalSign.com offer "Digital Signatures for Microsoft Office" at a reasonable $90/year for their "PersonalSign 2 Pro" product, or even $30/year for their email-validation only "PersonalSign 1" product.

They also offer a separate PDF-signing product which is two-factor and comes with a USB token, this product is considerably more expensive, at $370/year.

I don't understand this - a certificate can be marked as trusted for document signing, but as far as I know there is no per-application restriction inherent in certificates that says "you can use this in Office but not Acrobat", indeed when I open Acrobat Pro it lets me use any certificate on my machine to sign a document.

I spoke to their Live Chat support, asking if I can use an Office certificate for Acrobat and she replied, saying only the more expensive PDF signing product has a "key-usage" field set to allow PDF signing. I didn't want to debate this further as it looked like she was copy+pasting from their website, but I'm still not satisfied how this seemingly arbitrary restriction is implemented.

If suppose if I had more free cash I might drop the $90 for the "PersonalSign 2 Pro" product and try it to see if it works, but I don't want to risk potentially having my refund request denied if Acrobat doesn't work with the certificate.

Can anyone testify what certificates can be used for PDF signing?

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Today I was contacted by GlobalSign with a much better explanation, which I think answers this question:

So our PersonalSign product can be used to sign documents like Word Documents, Excel, Open/LibreOffice files, and even PDFs. The PersonalSign can also be used for e-mail signatures, e-mail encryption, and client / 2-Factor authentication.

The reason there is a separate product for PDF signatures is that while our PersonalSign product has the technical capability to sign a PDF, they will not show as trusted in Adobe Acrobat. It's not really our distinction, but a separate product that abides by Adobe's standards for signatures. Those certificates ultimately chain back to Adobe's Root Certificate so that they are trusted in Acrobat. Additionally the PDF signing certificate (in compliance with Adobe's CDS standards) are installed on a USB Token and cannot be exported from the device, they also place a timestamp using one of Adobe's servers enabling long term validity. There is also a higher level of vetting on those certificates than on our standard PersonalSign products.

So, the additional additional vetting, equipment, and compliance requirements increase the cost of that certificate.

And just to re-iterate, you CAN place a signature on a PDF with our PersonalSign certificate, it just will not show the "Blue Ribbon" that it's trusted in Adobe Acrobat. So depending on your needs for a signature, this may or may not be a viable option.

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