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DavidGreen07
Participant
April 4, 2020
Question

Adobe Print To PDF

  • April 4, 2020
  • 2 replies
  • 410 views

I'm really just looking for official confirmation of what I already know.. or think that I know. Although I hope that I'm wrong...

 

When printing to PDF what information actually saves? Just the visible text, images, etc. and whatever formatting? Or is there any chance that, in the case of an email for example, it saves all data (such as email headers) somewhere in the back structure end of the document? Obviously I know that you can print email headers to PDF... that's not what I'm asking. 

 

Printing to PDF just saves what the eyes can see,  no different than printing on paper.. correct? If one hasn't chosen to print email headers the data will not be included anywhere whatsoever in the PDF of the email? Not even the original formatting code of the email, right?  It can be of no forensics use to us by any small miracle? Or am I incorrect?

 

This topic has been closed for replies.

2 replies

Dov Isaacs
Dov Isaacs
Legend
April 4, 2020

Official reply 😃

 

For the most part, printing to PDF, at least printing to PDF using the Adobe PDF PostScript printer driver in Windows, part of Acrobat, “just saves what the eyes can see, no different than printing on paper” with some exceptions. The printing will fail if you try to print a PDF file to Adobe PDF that is protected. Furthermore, the process of printing PDF to Adobe PDF is lossy in that transparency is loss (due to flattening), color management is lost, and searchability may be limited to totally lost (the PostScript generated by Acrobat or Reader for printing is optimized for printing, not for PDF creation). You should also not assume that this may be used in any way as a poor man's redaction tool.

 

- Dov Isaacs, former Adobe Principal Scientist (April 30, 1990 - May 30, 2021)
try67
Community Expert
try67Community Expert
Community Expert
April 4, 2020

Not an official reply, but I think that yes, you are correct. It's not exactly the same as printing to paper, of course, but you do lose a lot of "metadata" when you do so. However, if the email was converted to PDF, not printed, then there is a chance that at least some of this information was retained.

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