Q: When merging signed PDFs or assembling pages from signed PDFs, jPDFProcess is throwing permission exceptions. How can I get around this?

A: We try to prevent operations on signed PDFs that would invalidate digital signatures in PDF documents. This is so that customers do not invalidate signatures by accident.

If you do not mind preserving the signatures, you can follow the steps below:

  • Make a call to the following static method to ignore signatures:

    AllPDFPermissions.setEnforceSignaturePermissions(false);

    The signatures will remain but they will be invalidated.

  • Read this kb article in our developer knowledge base to clear and delete signature fields in a PDF using Java

If you do wish to preserve the signatures, you could attach the signed PDFs one by one as file attachments within another PDF document instead of merging them.