Acrobat Sign 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 86 appearances across the HTPBE? corpus.
Corpus profile
Acrobat Sign is one of the PDF-handling tools surfaced in the HTPBE? corpus. Acrobat Sign appears predominantly as the Producer (100% of its occurrences) — i.e. on documents whose original Creator was a different application and that subsequently passed through Acrobat Sign on the way out.
In the HTPBE? corpus the contextual signal we look for is a producer/creator mismatch: when Acrobat Sign 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 Sign acts as Creator, 0% carry modification markers; on documents where it acts as Producer, 100% do. These are observed rates inside the HTPBE? corpus and should be read as base-rates, not as accusations against Acrobat Sign 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.
Distributions
The PDF versions Acrobat Sign writes when acting as Producer, and the other tools that appear in the same documents.
Most output is PDF 1.7 (50% of files where Acrobat Sign is the Producer).
Related profiles
Other tools that frequently share metadata with Acrobat Sign in the same documents. Each card links to its own forensic profile.
Long tail
Smaller cuts of the Acrobat Sign 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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