Tomas,

Tomas Vojtech wrote:
> I have a problem with reading PDF sent as attachment. There are 3
> signatures that Adobe Reader 9 shows but iText's AcroFields class doesn't
> return.
> 
> [...]
> 
> My question is. Is something bad with the document or is it bug of iText?

Something is bad with the document:

Its catalog (15 0) references its interactive form dictionary (56 0) which
in turn references three fields (65 0, 68 0, 71 0), the three signature
fields. So far, so good.

The signature fields, though, are not referenced from any page. This is
allowed (there once was quite some discussion on this here...), but makes
the iText field search in the first part of the fill() method not find the
signature fields.

Further looking at your PDF, the interactive form dictionary does not
contain a SigFlags entry. Thus any conforming PDF reader may assume the
default value 0 (cf. ISO-32000:1, Table 218).

This value actually is to be interpreted as a bit array where the bit at the
lowest position means (cf ibidem, Table 219):


> If set, the document contains at least one signature field. This flag
> allows a conforming reader to enable user interface items (such as menu
> items or pushbuttons) related to signature processing without having to
> scan the entire document for the presence of signature fields.

Applied to iText --- being non-graphical --- this flag allows iText to
decide whether or not to make an additional attempt to find signature fields
not referenced from any page.

In case of your document the SigFlags default value 0 tells iText that there
is no need to look any further. And so it ignores the three signatures...

Therefore, you should ask the producer of those signed documents to properly
add a SigFlags entry if he wants to make sure his signatures are found and
recognized by conforming software.

Regards,   Michael.

PS: Even though the SigFlags are correctly interpreted here by iText, the
secondary search throught the fields tree would not take too long or block
too many resources. IMO iText should scan that tree whether the lowest
SigFlags bit is set or not.
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