Acrobat PDFMaker appears on both legitimate first-generation output and downstream re-save flows — context (the other tool on the same document) is what flips the signal.
Back to all statisticsForensic verdictBased on 29 appearances across the HTPBE? corpus.
Corpus profile
Acrobat PDFMaker is one of the PDF-handling tools surfaced in the HTPBE? corpus. Acrobat PDFMaker appears predominantly as the original Creator (100% of its occurrences) — i.e. on documents that started life inside Acrobat PDFMaker rather than passing through it as a downstream re-saver.
In the HTPBE? corpus the contextual signal we look for is a producer/creator mismatch: when Acrobat PDFMaker appears as the latest Producer on a document whose Creator was an institutional source (e.g. Adobe PDF Library, Microsoft Word, a banking back-end), the document was rebuilt or re-saved after its original creation. That mismatch is the marker — never the tool itself.
On documents where Acrobat PDFMaker acts as Creator, 86% carry modification markers; on documents where it acts as Producer, 0% do. These are observed rates inside the HTPBE? corpus and should be read as base-rates, not as accusations against Acrobat PDFMaker or its users.
Role in the workflow
Every PDF carries a Creator (the application that produced the original document) and a Producer (the engine that wrote the PDF). The same tool can appear in either slot, with very different modification profiles.
Name fingerprints
Different version strings and spellings observed for Acrobat PDFMaker in the wild. All are merged into the same canonical profile.
Why variants matter
The same tool publishes itself under 7 different metadata strings — version bumps, locale tags, build IDs. We canonicalize them so the corpus reflects one identity, not noise.
Distributions
The PDF versions Acrobat PDFMaker writes when acting as Producer, and the other tools that appear in the same documents.
Related profiles
Other tools that frequently share metadata with Acrobat PDFMaker in the same documents. Each card links to its own forensic profile.
Long tail
Smaller cuts of the Acrobat PDFMaker corpus — useful context, but treat each row as a single data point rather than a strong signal.
PDFs carrying at least one digital signature
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