Costa Rica’s UCR to launch advanced digital signature extension for LibreOffice

Costa Rica’s UCR to launch advanced digital signature extension for LibreOffice

The Computing Centre of the University of Costa Rica (UCR) will be launching an advanced digital signature extension for LibreOffice on 19th June, Costa Rica’s El Pais reports.

LibreOffice banner

The launch, which will take place in the auditorium of the Economic Science Faculty of UCR’s main Rodrigo Facio site, aims to explain and publicise the working of the extension added to the LibreOffice office suite.

It will enable a document to be validated with a timestamp. This is the first time that such a free extension of this kind has been implemented in Costa Rica.

It should be pointed out that UCR’s Computing Centre is the first organisation within Costa Rica to develop an open source digital signature component. It will enable Open Document files to be signed in the advanced XADES X-4 format.

As Juan Carlos Romero, the extension’s developer, explained “open code libraries were used to develop this extension, along with the reuse of code from Belgium, a country which has a very robust free digital signature platform; based on this code we started to develop the 100% free software component for LibreOffice”.

Finally, according to information provided by UCR’s Information Centre, which has spent more than 40 years developing and managing technology projects for education, it is presumed that the extension will be adapted within months to be compatible with all versions of LibreOffice.

Author: Steve Woods

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