I have already acquired a S/MIME certificate (a .p12 file) issued by an authority. Using it in Writer, I can digitally sign documents by following this procedure : How do I make a digital certificate available to LibreOffice Writer for digital signatures?
Can I do the same for PDF files? If yes, what method do you suggest me? I would prefer a solution that relies on Free Software.
Best Answer
Your only option is Portable Signer. Download it and run the jar. It requires a private key in a p12 file though (not compatible with SmartCard).
You might expect Ubuntu document signing tools like qdigidoc or gpg would do, but no, they don't play with PDF signatures.
You might then expect Ubuntu PDF manipulation tools like qpdf, which provides encryption, or pdftk, which provides watermarking, to provide signing features too, but, no, they don't.
The total list of opensource tools available for your purpose is: http://wiki.cacert.org/PdfSigning
Unfortunately, none of the tools is currently maintained and none can be found in Ubuntu packages. Portable Signer is the most well maintained of all.