PDFCreator 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
PDFCreator is one of the PDF-handling tools surfaced in the HTPBE? corpus. PDFCreator splits its occurrences between Creator (63%) and Producer (38%) 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 PDFCreator 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 PDFCreator acts as Creator, 100% 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 PDFCreator 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 PDFCreator in the wild. All are merged into the same canonical profile.
Why variants matter
The same tool publishes itself under 3 different metadata strings — version bumps, locale tags, build IDs. We canonicalize them so the corpus reflects one identity, not noise.
Distributions
The PDF versions PDFCreator writes when acting as Producer, and the other tools that appear in the same documents.
Most output is PDF 1.4 (100% of files where PDFCreator is the Producer).
Related profiles
Other tools that frequently share metadata with PDFCreator in the same documents. Each card links to its own forensic profile.
Long tail
Smaller cuts of the PDFCreator corpus — useful context, but treat each row as a single data point rather than a strong signal.
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