workflow steps will have an invalid signature that indicates that the content of the document is not approved by the author and cannot be trusted optionally the method can also reject any unauthorized changes and the display can revert to a previous state such as the signed state of the electronic document note that some viewing applications may not honor the rules and may therefore permit any changes without restriction but any unauthorized changes will be detected using the detection method discussed above with reference to fig2 as was described above in one implementation in addition to the rules that have been defined for the document there may also be a different set of rules that are associated with the user for whom the document is intended for example the document may be encrypted in addition to having the rules described above so that only a particular group of users can access the content of the document alternatively the document may contain additional information about enabling or disabling features of the user 39 s electronic document reader together with the rules for the document these user specific rules form a set of user permissions that define which operations a user can perform on the electronic document the permissions thus constitute the logical u201c and.