Adobe Acrobat reads as a downstream re-saver — it surfaces disproportionately on documents whose original Creator was a different, often institutional, application.
Back to all statisticsForensic verdictBased on this tool’s share of the HTPBE? corpus.
Corpus profile
Adobe Acrobat is the canonical PDF editor. Its presence as the latest Producer indicates the document was opened and saved by Acrobat at least once after creation.
Acrobat as Producer is extremely common and legitimate on its own. Contextual signal arises only when Acrobat’s save coincides with incremental-update evidence (xref appended), modifications-after-signing markers, or producer/creator mismatch — all of which are layered on independently.
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 Adobe Acrobat in the wild. All are merged into the same canonical profile.
Why variants matter
The same tool publishes itself under 28 different metadata strings — version bumps, locale tags, build IDs. We canonicalize them so the corpus reflects one identity, not noise.
Distributions
The PDF versions Adobe Acrobat writes when acting as Producer, and the other tools that appear in the same documents.
Most output is PDF 1.6 (99% of files where Adobe Acrobat is the Producer).
Adobe Acrobat sits upstream in 97% of cases — read this row as “what kinds of documents end up routed through Adobe Acrobat.”
Related profiles
Other tools that frequently share metadata with Adobe Acrobat in the same documents. Each card links to its own forensic profile.
Long tail
Smaller cuts of the Adobe Acrobat corpus — useful context, but treat each row as a single data point rather than a strong signal.
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