macOS Print to PDF 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 747 appearances across the HTPBE? corpus.
Corpus profile
macOS Print to PDF is the system-level PDF generator built into macOS’s print pipeline (the "Save as PDF" option in any Print dialog). Almost every Mac-originated PDF that did not come from a dedicated authoring app passes through this path.
macOS Print to PDF appears overwhelmingly on Mac-authored documents and is among the highest-volume producers in the HTPBE? corpus. It is a low-signal producer for tampering — the document was rendered by a Mac in one pass.
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 macOS Print to PDF in the wild. All are merged into the same canonical profile.
Why variants matter
The same tool publishes itself under 50 different metadata strings — version bumps, locale tags, build IDs. We canonicalize them so the corpus reflects one identity, not noise.
Distributions
The PDF versions macOS Print to PDF writes when acting as Producer, and the other tools that appear in the same documents.
Most output is PDF 1.3 (88% of files where macOS Print to PDF is the Producer).
Preview sits upstream in 22% of cases — read this row as “what kinds of documents end up routed through macOS Print to PDF.”
Related profiles
Other tools that frequently share metadata with macOS Print to PDF in the same documents. Each card links to its own forensic profile.
Long tail
Smaller cuts of the macOS Print to PDF corpus — useful context, but treat each row as a single data point rather than a strong signal.
Files containing JavaScript code
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