Adobe Scan 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 this tool’s share of the HTPBE? corpus.
Corpus profile
Adobe Scan is one of the PDF-handling tools surfaced in the HTPBE? corpus. Adobe Scan splits its occurrences between Creator (50%) and Producer (50%) roles, meaning it sometimes originates documents and sometimes re-emits them after another tool created them.
In the HTPBE? corpus the contextual signal we look for is a producer/creator mismatch: when Adobe Scan 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 Adobe Scan acts as Creator, 28% carry modification markers; on documents where it acts as Producer, 28% do. These are observed rates inside the HTPBE? corpus and should be read as base-rates, not as accusations against Adobe Scan 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 Adobe Scan in the wild. All are merged into the same canonical profile.
Why variants matter
The same tool publishes itself under 14 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 Scan writes when acting as Producer, and the other tools that appear in the same documents.
Most output is PDF 1.7 (60% of files where Adobe Scan is the Producer).
Adobe Scan sits upstream in 97% of cases — read this row as “what kinds of documents end up routed through Adobe Scan.”
Related profiles
Other tools that frequently share metadata with Adobe Scan in the same documents. Each card links to its own forensic profile.
Long tail
Smaller cuts of the Adobe Scan corpus — useful context, but treat each row as a single data point rather than a strong signal.
Of files have attachments inside
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