til: paperless vs signed pdfs

content/til/how-to-force-paperless-to-consume-signed-pdfs.md

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+---
+title: "How to force paperless-ngx to consume signed PDFs"
+date: 2023-12-06
+tags: 
+- paperless
+- paperless-ngx
+- docker
+---
+
+I use [paperless-ngx]() to manage my documents, together with some rules that automaticaly
+ingest PDFs from my mail boxes. However, I noticed that a recently received invoice from AWS
+was not ingested as expected. Looking at the logs I found this error message for it:
+
+``` text
+invoice.pdf: Error occurred while consuming document invoice.pdf: DigitalSignatureError: Input PDF has a digital signature. OCR would alter the document,
+invalidating the signature.
+```
+
+I don't know if a software update brought this refusal to run OCR on signed PDFs, or if AWS
+simply so long didn't send me signed PDFs, but I needed to find a way to force paperless to
+ingest signed things as well as having all of that stuff stored in paperless is a vital part 
+of my accounting workflow.
+
+A quick search for the error message brought me to 
+[this discussion on the paperless-ngx GitHub repository](https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx/discussions/4047) 
+and therein I also found the [solution](https://github.com/paperless-ngx/paperless-ngx/discussions/4047#discussioncomment-7019544), 
+which is to set the `PAPERLESS_OCR_USER_ARGS` config option to 
+`{"invalidate_digital_signatures": true}`.
+
+As I run paperless via Docker I needed to add the following to the `environment` section in my paperless 
+`docker-compose.yml`:
+
+``` yaml
+services:
+  # ...
+  paperless:
+    # ...
+    environment:
+      # ...
+      PAPERLESS_OCR_USER_ARGS: '{"invalidate_digital_signatures": true}'
+      # ...
+```
+
+And after adding this and a quick `docker compose up -d` things seem to now work as expected 
+again. Yay!
+