From 5ee6a3437c517a4b82ee545690a773fb5da44280 Mon Sep 17 00:00:00 2001 From: tannevaled Date: Sun, 18 Oct 2026 15:29:57 +0200 Subject: [PATCH] The place verb in the docs: a signature is a picture, not cryptography MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit `pdfops place` draws a picture where you say it goes — a signature, a logo, a seal — and the operations page now names it among the verbs and shows it on the command line. It also says what the tool is NOT. "Sign a PDF" in every tool that offers it means a picture of a signature, placed; a drawn squiggle proves nothing about who drew it, and the cryptographic kind is a different job under a different name. Leaving that unsaid is how a scanned squiggle comes to be called a digital signature. This edit waited: when it was written, another session held the lease on this repository and was investigating a red default branch, so it was stashed rather than committed into their worktree. The lease has since lapsed and this branch is cut from current main, not from the branch that was checked out then. Built with hugo and checked on the BUILT page, not on the source. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 --- content/working-with-a-file/operations.md | 10 ++++++++-- 1 file changed, 8 insertions(+), 2 deletions(-) diff --git a/content/working-with-a-file/operations.md b/content/working-with-a-file/operations.md index 5afbb85..001d21a 100644 --- a/content/working-with-a-file/operations.md +++ b/content/working-with-a-file/operations.md @@ -24,8 +24,13 @@ pages and `1,1` gives two copies. Merge, select, delete, reverse, move, rotate, crop, resize, split; n-up, booklet, overlay and underlay, blank pages; watermarks, page numbers, Bates -stamps and free stamps; sanitize, flatten, strip; compress, encrypt, decrypt -and permissions; and reading a page back as text or as pictures. +stamps and free stamps; placing a picture — a signature, a logo, a seal; +sanitize, flatten, strip; compress, encrypt, decrypt and permissions; and +reading a page back as text or as pictures. + +`place` is what "sign a PDF" means in every tool that offers it: a picture of +a signature, put where you say. It is not cryptography and does not claim to +be — a drawn squiggle proves nothing about who drew it. Links and bookmarks are **carried over** and pointed at the pages they became, so extracting three pages of a book leaves the links between those three @@ -40,6 +45,7 @@ pdfops merge out.pdf a.pdf b.pdf pdfops select -pages 4-6 report.pdf extract.pdf pdfops nup -n 4 slides.pdf handout.pdf pdfops watermark -text CONFIDENTIAL contract.pdf marked.pdf +pdfops place -image signature.png -at bottom-right -width 120 contract.pdf signed.pdf pdfops encrypt -user letmein -allow print,copy plain.pdf locked.pdf pdfops -password letmein permissions locked.pdf pdfops text -layout -pages 1 paper.pdf