digital signature / openssl > open office help

[kwhiskers]

I have been trying to digitally sign an open office writer document (odt).
When I click on 'digital signature', a window opens up stating that nobody
has yet signed the document, which is true. When I then click to pick a
signature with which to sign, none at all are listed in the second window
that opens and there is no obvious way to import digital signatures and
certificates.

I have looked on the open office forum and it was stated that open office
looks for the signature in the ~/.thunderbird (not installed), then
~/.firefox and ~/.mozilla directories. I have installed the required .pkc12
certificates in those 2 programs. According to the information given, when
the certificate bundle is installed there, it should now appear in open
office.

It doesn't.

Is there some different place to put the signature or certificate file in
the Fedora version of open office 2? Must I state this location, perhaps, in
the paths set-up in open office? What is the path to give and what is it
called?

First I tried using my digital signature from gnupg, which is in .asc
format, but that wouldn't import into mozilla or firefox. Then I tried to
convert it to pkcs12, but there seems to be no way to do so, so I had to
create another. I used openssl to create a .pem certificate which I then
converted into a .pkcs12 certificate bundle, which installed successfully
into konqueror, firefox and the old mozilla.

Furthermore, the open office forum suggested one make symbolic links from
the certificate databases of firefox to mozilla, so as not to have 2
unsyncronized certificate stores. After not having success with 2
certificate stores, I deleted one and made the other links.

Despite having followed all the directions, the available
signatures/certificates in open office are nil.

Where do I put signatures/certificates to have them be usable in open office
2.0? Should they occur somewhere under /etc/pki, perhaps? Where? What form
must they be? .asc, .pkcs12, .pem... what?

There seems to be some ambiguity in this, too, in that
mozilla/firefox/thunderbird want .pkcs12 certificates, which are actually
used for verifying the validity of web pages, yet the information in the
open office forum says that it is these directories that are read by open
office (they sure don't seem to be, unless there is some undocumented secret
way of activating it).

However, a pkcs12 file is a certificate, but open office does digital
signing. A digital signature is what is made with gnupg. Such a digital
signature is used to sign an email, for example, as in kmail or evolution. A
signature is not a certificate. I don't want to verify that a web page comes
from the domain to which is has been registered by a certificate authority
(CA), but rather, simply want to digitally sign a document, attesting to my
authorship.

I now have public & private digital keys, self-signed by me; I have a
self-signed digital certificate, issued by me... and still I have no
apparent way to sign a document I have written.

Does anyone have the answer?
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