Hello,
we’re currently facing problems reading/extracting digital signatures from a PDF.
Solutions we looked into:
- ReadPDFText: Using the Read PDF Activity it’s sometime possible to extract signatures with string manipulation but since we don’t know where the people will sign and which size the signature will be, we do not have consitent results.
- Adobe Sign API: Apart from the fact that it costs something, you cannot extract signatures which weren’t signed via the Adobe Sign platform. Correct me if I’m wrong though.
- UI-Automation: It’s obviously the worst way to automate this, but so far it seems to be the most consistent. We’d basically be automating the UI of Adobe Acrobat Reader to show all the signatures and use Read Text to extract the names. This kind of works.
Our next problem is that people sign the PDF in different locations and we only need the signatures from certain locations.
This is not possible with UI-Automation.
The next idea would be to extract all signatures via UI-Automation and used ReadPDFText to try to find where each signature resides on the pdf.
I really hope someone here has a better approach.
Curious to read what you think!
Cheers,
T0Bi