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PDF-T-Maker is a free add-in to Microsoft Word for creating rich PDF documents. Normally, using tools like PDFCreator is enough when I want to output to PDF files. However, sometimes when I need to create a PDF document with table of contents and links, PDF-T-Maker is a good replacement for Acrobat. The idea is that I create the rich document is MS Word, then have PDF-T-Maker convert it to PDF with the meta information preserved.

One thing that bugs me however, is that after installing this add-in I then get the Security Warning dialog every time I launch Word.

This is because the PDF-T-Maker add-in is a Word template file with VBA macros that gets loaded when MS Word is launched, and because I had my macro security level set to Medium. Lowering the security level to Low would remove the dialog, but it’s definitely not recommended.

Macros must be digitally signed so that I could tell Word to trust the publisher – this would get rid of the security warning. Since the creator of PDF-T-Maker didn’t sign their macros, I couldn’t do that. Then it hit me: why not sign it myself using a self-signed certificate? This turns out to be perfect since I will only use this locally and don’t need to worry about authentication. Here’s how to do it.

First, you’ll need to create a digital signature for code signing. MS Office has a tool for creating self-signed certificates for VBA use. You can find it as Digital Certificate for VBA Projects in the Start menu.

When creating the certificate, you could designate any name. I use transcom.de for the creator of PDF-T-Maker.

Once that is done, open PDF-T-Maker.dot in MS Word. Select Tools > Macro > Visual Basic Editor from the menu. This should open the Visual Basic window, then select Tools > Digital Signature… from the menu.

Click the Choose button to assign a certificate.

Select the certificate that you just created. Accept the changes and save the file.

Close the file and restart Word. This time the security warning will be different. Now you can check Always trust macros from this publisher and choose Enable Macros.

The next time Word is launched, you will no longer be prompted about PDF-T-Maker.dot’s macros.