Is there a way to find out if Adobe InDesign created something online?

Question

Is there some way to find out if Adobe InDesign created a publication that was uploaded online, and as PDF?

Steve Werner · Accepted Answer

If a PDF was created by InDesign you can tell by opening it in Adobe Reader or Adobe Acrobat. Choose File > Properties > Description as you see below:

David W. Goodrich · Answer

Steve is correct for PDFs that do not undergo further processing: InDesign automatically fills in the Application, as well as dates of Creation and Modification. The Advanced section also adds PDF Version and PDF Producer (for IDCS6, Adobe PDF Library 10.0.1).

However these details can be changed or dropped if posting the PDFs on-line involves re-processing, as routinely happens with PDFs I submit to an academic publisher. As you can see from the screen-grab, the aforementioned categories have all been scrubbed clean except the PDF Version -- which was changed from 1.4 -- and the optional metadata I provided (Title, Author, Subject, and Keywords) has likewise disappeared. Surprisingly, even the copyright information embedded in individual images has been removed. (Note that Adobe Reader cannot show the latter as viewing object-level metadata requires right-clicking Acrobat Pro's Edit Object tool.)

David

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