GPL Ghostscript 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
Ghostscript is an open-source PostScript/PDF interpreter used both as an internal print-pipeline component (legitimate) and as a re-distillation step that flattens / rebuilds an existing PDF.
Ghostscript as the latest Producer on a document whose Creator was institutional typically indicates a re-distillation pass — that producer/creator mismatch is the contextual signal.
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 GPL Ghostscript in the wild. All are merged into the same canonical profile.
Why variants matter
The same tool publishes itself under 16 different metadata strings — version bumps, locale tags, build IDs. We canonicalize them so the corpus reflects one identity, not noise.
Distributions
The PDF versions GPL Ghostscript 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 GPL Ghostscript is the Producer).
PScript5 sits upstream in 24% of cases — read this row as “what kinds of documents end up routed through GPL Ghostscript.”
Related profiles
Other tools that frequently share metadata with GPL Ghostscript in the same documents. Each card links to its own forensic profile.
Long tail
Smaller cuts of the GPL Ghostscript corpus — useful context, but treat each row as a single data point rather than a strong signal.
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