Skip to main content
When the last recipient finishes, the envelope is sealed, and that is one pipeline with no options: the field values are flattened into the PDF, a Certificate of Completion is generated and appended, and then the whole assembled document is signed.
  • ⚠️ The signature covers the flattened fields and the certificate, because signing happens last. One applied before the certificate was appended would either be invalidated by appending it or — worse — stay technically valid while covering only part of what a reader sees.
  • ⚠️ A live seal is a PAdES signature with long-term validation and an RFC 3161 timestamp — everything needed to verify it is inside the file, and verifying it never asks us anything. It is not yet trusted, though: our AATL certificate has not arrived, so we sign with one this organisation issued to itself, and Adobe Reader reports “signature validity unknown” on it. That is correct — no public trust store carries the issuer — and your recipients will see the yellow bar. The seal is intact and the audit trail proves who signed independently of the certificate, but we would rather you heard this from us than from a customer. Swapping in the AATL certificate is configuration on our side, not a release of this product; documents sealed before the swap keep the certificate they were sealed with. The swap moves the live certificate only: the sandbox seals under separate configuration of its own, so nothing you rehearse against the sandbox changes on the day the AATL certificate arrives.
  • ⚠️ A sandbox seal is a real seal by a certificate that is not our binding one. Every page is watermarked, the seal covers the watermark, and your PDF reader will report the signature as intact and its issuer as untrusted — which is exactly the case your verification code needs to handle and the one you would otherwise never get to rehearse. The certificate itself names a sandbox authority, so a verifier reading nothing but the signature panel can tell a test document from a real one. Which of the two you get is decided by the credential that created the envelope, and is never inferred later.
  • A sealed document is not recallable. Rehearse with a test key.