What is Official Seal?
A formal seal applied by an authority or organisation to certify that a document is authentic and officially issued.
An official seal is a mark of authority applied to certify that a document — a certificate, licence, resolution, or attestation — was officially issued by the named body. Government departments, notaries, schools, and companies all use official seals. Digitally, an official seal pairs a recognisable visual mark with verifiable metadata: who applied it, when, and a tamper-evident link back to the issuing record. PDF Verified supports official-seal stamps with serial numbers, locked metadata hashes, and public QR verification.
What makes a seal "official"
Authority and traceability. An official seal must be applied by an authorised holder and be verifiable after the fact. PDF Verified enforces both: stamps live in a controlled library that can be shared only with chosen teammates, and each application writes an auditable, QR-verifiable usage record.
Serial numbers and anti-fraud
Turn on Advanced serialization and each application of the official seal gets a unique serial plus a locked metadata hash. Anyone scanning the stamp's QR code reaches a public page showing the serial, the document it was applied to, and whether the seal has since been revoked — making forged or reused seals easy to detect.