I want to see how others may be adding persistent or non persistent engineers stamps and signatures to SolidWorks drawings (or other documents) via a workflow in EPDM. Are you using custom API or is there an add-in that does this for you? How well does it work? Thoughts? Technically we are top either use a hard stamp and sign/date or an electronic version and overlay a signature and then date our drawings, so ...
Yes that would work great and I will use it for exactly your example. But in my case I need to rubber "stamp" and "sign" the drawing in ink. That is, put a set of gifs one over the other plus a date.
Can't come up with a way to do it with a fancy, blocky looking red font? If you really need to do it with images, you'll need to use API.
Sadly yes, I need the images. But then again I need that to swap out the logo as well.
If you need a digital signature that looks like a signature, the only way that I know of is to use Adobe Acrobat's digital signatures. Unfortunately, that only works for Adobe Acrobat documents. But I wouldn't rely on SolidWorks drawings themselves for production work, simply because things can unexpectedly change.
I prefer to save the SolidWorks drawings as PDFs. They can be easily viewed by anyone who has acrobat reader, navigation (panning & zooming) is as intuitive as in SolidWorks, and you can add markups, watermarks and digital signatures that can be validated. Another benefit that I almost forgot... you can define levels of security to the document to protect your IP (prevent page extraction, copying, printing, etc.). That said, I don't know how an acrobat file in Enterprise PDM could be digitally signed without checking it out, signing it, then checking it back in. If anyone has a better idea, I'm all ears.
No, I am not using the SolidWorks files themselves for Production, but am generating PDF's from the "Released to Library" drawings. Likely I will put some checks in there to see if lower level parts or drawings changed from the as stored version. If changes happened I will require either the drawing be reved up or acknowledged that the changes do not affect the drawing.
This whole question of stamping and signing drawings comes from a legal requirement in my jurisdiction. Generally people ignore it as it is always a pain. And in the case of putting it into a workflow, doubly. That being said before I decide it is not worth the pain, I need to explore deeper. As engineers we must control our stamps and signatures. So it must be us, via our credentials etc, that puts them on the drawings. In the holding state called "Released to the Library", we will have no stamps and signatures. They would only get affixed when it momentarily passed thru the "Issued for Construction" state where the work order etc info gets temporarily added, production PDF's issued, DXF's issued, DXF followers issued, etc.. Then that info would get cleared and it returns to the "Released to Library" state.
Well the problem with putting pictures of signatures in the SolidWorks drawings is that they have no security... they can be copied and pasted by anyone, so there is no control.
Acrobat digital signatures however, are encrypted and can be validated by clicking on the signature. You cannot simply copy and paste the acrobat digital signatures.
While I may end up using Adobe to do this, if I successfully do it in SW, my plan is for the signature to live on the drawing only fleetingly. The state will change from "Released to Library" to "Issued for Construction", the signature added. PDF (with Work order information added) generated etc. Then the signature is removed (blanked out) and the state returned to "Released to Library". We engineers get to control our stamps as we would be in the workflow to authorize that step.
We may have various drawing formats and the location may vary slightly. IN EPDM and workflows I should be able to control how and where the stamp and signature are placed. But in Adobe I can use watermarks and the API but I need to dp APi work for another program. Not as fun.
I like creating a note on the drawing, linking that note to the file properties, then having the workflow update the file properties via the datacard.
http://www.3dvision.com/wordpress/index.php/2008/02/07/ez-solidworks-watermark/