[FEATURE]: Possibility to make email text and footer language configurable

[TheDom42]

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.

First of all - thank you for a great product! It helps greatly in the process!

We are a German company and have multiple domestic and international customers. Our Nextcloud (and our users) have their language set to German. When we want to start a signing process with an international customer, they receive the notification emails in German. Also, the footer text for validation is in German (which is the bigger problem than the German emails).

Describe the solution you'd like

It would be great, if the LibreSign language could be made independent from the Nextcloud or user language. This could be a default language dropdown in the admin settings.
In a perfect solution, a user can configure the whole signing process for a certain document with a certain language. This way, the user could switch to the local language for domestic contacts and e.g., English, for international contacts. As there are already translations for many languages, they should "just" (please note that I understand that this is possibly not that easy) be made accessible via the UI.

Describe alternatives you've considered

I have seen #189, but sometimes the automatic solution might not be the best for a certain document process.
I have tried to switch the user language for the signature requester but this only switched the language for the initial email. The footer text was still in German.

Additional context

No response

[vitormattos]

Hello @TheDom42 , thanks for your suggestion, and thank you for your kind words about the project. We are dedicated to providing everyone with a digital signature solution focused on security and privacy, and of course, 100% FLOSS (we love it).

Regarding issue #189, I believe it was closed because the email texts were made translatable via Transifex together with other LibreSign texts, but that doesn’t fully cover your scenario.

Considering your use case, a simple improvement could be to allow choosing the recipient’s language when a signing request is sent to an email, SMS, WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, or XMPP address. This way, the existing LibreSign translations could be reused when sending messages.

A related feature that would also be valuable is the ability to customize the entire email template per language.

On that note, the next LibreSign release will include a new feature that allows adding custom text for each signer in the message. This does not replace the full email template, but lets you insert an additional custom message into the current email.

If features like these are important to you and you’d like to see faster releases and more dedicated development, we would really appreciate your support through a recurring sponsorship. Regular support plays a key role in keeping the project sustainable and improving its development pace. If you are interested in funding the full feature, you can also contact our sales team.

Thanks again for your input!

[TheDom42]

Thank you for the update, @vitormattos!

As I mentioned, I think it would be great if a default language for LibreSign could be set. This would switch the notification texts, the embedded PDF text, and the text on the verification webpage. Speaking from our perspective: even as a German company, we would set the default text to English (without switching the whole Nextcloud instance language).

If this could then be made configurable for each document signing process, this would be even better.

In any case, the existing LibreSign translations could be reused. Yes, the ability to send a custom message is also nice, but it wouldn't even be necessary in our case.
I will discuss the possibility of a sponsorship :)

P.S. You mention signing requests to SMS, WhatsApp, Signal, etc. - I could only find external invitations via email. Is that a future feature? Or did I miss something? It would be great if a signing request could use SMS or WhatsApp as a second factor for the confirmation token.

[vitormattos]

Thank you for the reply and for your intention to help the project, that really means a lot to us and makes us very happy to read.

[vitormattos]

About signing requests via SMS, WhatsApp, etc.

Good question, you didn’t miss anything.

Support for sending signing requests via SMS, WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, and XMPP is coming in the next LibreSign release. We are currently in the stabilization phase, focusing on code refinements and extensive testing, as this release includes many other new features.

In the initial release, these channels will be used to deliver the signing link, not as a second factor (2FA) yet. We have already identified the need to improve the UI and documentation to clearly show that signing requests are not limited to user accounts and email only, and that other delivery channels are available.

[vitormattos]

About language handling and templates

Your suggestion makes a lot of sense, and we agree that simply tying everything to the requester’s Nextcloud language is limiting.

One possible, more flexible direction we see is:

• Defining a default language for outgoing messages, independent of the requester’s language.
• Keeping the signing interface language determined by the browser (as Nextcloud already does), which works well once the recipient opens the link.

However, as you pointed out, this still has limitations in multinational environments.

A more complete approach we are considering is:

• Providing a place in LibreSign where administrators can manage message templates, both for email and short-message gateways (SMS, WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, XMPP).

• These templates would cover all current message contexts:

  • There is a file for you to sign
  • Changes into a file for you to sign
  • A file has been signed
  • A signature request has been canceled
  • Code to sign file

• Each template could have translations for multiple languages, a default version, and be selectable when starting a signing process (possibly under advanced options).

• For recurring signers, LibreSign could even reuse the last template and language previously used.

• The feature coming in the next release allows adding custom text inside the current template. In the future, this could be extended to allow full template customization.

This approach would provide much more control while still reusing existing LibreSign translations where appropriate.

What do you think about this direction?

[vitormattos]

About sponsorship and sustainability

We really appreciate you considering sponsorship 💚

LibreSign is maintained mainly because we strongly believe in FLOSS and in the project’s potential. That said, recurring funding is essential for us to increase development capacity, ship releases faster, and grow the team.

As a reference, to sustainably maintain and expand our current team, we would need around €4,000/month in recurring funding — today we are far below that. For higher recurring sponsorships (for example, €1,000+/month), we can offer:

• Dedicated support hours
• Prioritization of specific features (such as the ones discussed here)
• Help with LibreSign configuration and daily operation
• Early and more detailed insights into upcoming features

Thanks again for your suggestions. Messages like this make us very happy and help us understand how important LibreSign is for you and your company. As an open-source project, we often only get this kind of insight when users share their experience with us.