Hi Bastain,

> Control: retitle -1 RFP: python-pyhanko -- Sign and stamp PDF files
> 
> You can find a complete package at 
> https://salsa.debian.org/python-team/packages/python-pyhanko
> if you want to go ahead. xhtml2pdf was patched to get rid of the pyhanko 
> dependency.

I've exhausted probably every option in the Debian archive to sign PDF 
documents and found that PyHanko offers everything I've ever dreamed of. I've 
installed your draft package on Salsa as is and it really helped me. I'm 
sharing this to let you and others know how much this will be appreciated, and 
that it deserves to be uploaded in its own right.

PyHanko is not just a library but comes with an easy-to-use command-line tool 
so I could get up and running in an instant. (Note that sometimes the python- 
prefix is dropped from the source and binary package names in cases like this, 
as with WeasyPrint, if the command-line tool is a prominent interface.)

PyHanko supports adding unsigned signature fields to a document whereas MuPDF's 
mutool and Poppler's pdfsig only allow making the field and signing the 
document in a single atomic operation. If you're preparing a document for other 
people to sign easily, prepping a not-yet-signed signature field is important 
for ease of use and out of courtesy. PyHanko also supports timestamping, to 
which LibreOffice is the only competitor I know.

WeasyPrint, a tool and Python library for turning HTML documents into 
high-quality PDF documents, supports creation of PDF forms from HTML forms and 
other sophisticated features. However, they've decided that an interface for 
PDF signing is best left out of WeasyPrint. PyHanko fills this niche perfectly, 
and since it likewise has both a Python library and a command-line tool, they 
can work together in a straightforward pipeline.

I understand you're pretty busy working on all sorts of things, but I want to 
make clear that PyHanko holds a lot of promise for use outside of xhtml2pdf, 
and it even has a lot of polish and outstanding documentation. Thanks for your 
work on this. Putting your draft package in Salsa to make it easy for anyone to 
jump in is especially admirable.

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