Can I tell which software generated a PDF file?

Question

Given a PDF file. Can I find out which software/libraries (e.g. PDFBox, Adobe Acrobat, iText...) where used to created/edit it?

Answer 1

The Adobe specification defines the Producer field (see 'Mac OS X 10.5.6 Quartz PDFContext' in screenshot nimeshjm's answer) as the name of the application that "converted from another format to PDF". In case of generating a PDF programmatically, the PDF isn't really converted so you will normally find the name of the generating SDK here.

The Creator field is related and is defined as the name of the application that created the document from which the PDF was converted. This is typically MS Word or so.

Note that this is all by convention. In practice, you cannot really rely on this and you may encounter for example empty Producer fields.

Answer 2

You can try opening the file in Adobe Read and look at the properties.

You can find this in: File -> Properties in Adobe Reader after you open the pdf file.