7

I came across a comment under this answer https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/26530/133604 :

What's the difference between pdfproducer and pdfcreator?

Now, a lot of examples regarding the usage of hyperref and metadata use templates like this one:

\hypersetup{
...
pdfcreator={Creator},   % creator of the document
pdfproducer={Producer}, % producer of the document
....
}

Looking at the manual did not help to solve the above question. Can you explain the difference between both?

Furthermore, I don't known which one to set explicitly and why I should use it.

For the moment I have been using the line

pdfcreator={LaTeX with hyperref (gitREF, gitSHA)}

where gitREF is set to git rev-parse --abbrev-ref HEAD and gitSHA to git rev-parse --short HEAD. Being confronted to choose between pdfcreator and pdfproducer to store this data I am not sure which one makes more sense at least for my use case.

el_tenedor
  • 193
  • 3
    according to the pdf reference both should be set if a pdf is created by converting from another format. Then creator is the application which created the original document and producer the converter. E.g. if you convert from docx Creator=Word, Producer=printtopdf. It doesn't really fit the production with a pdftex engine, but if you go through dvi, producer is e.g. ghostscript. – Ulrike Fischer Mar 31 '21 at 18:47
  • @UlrikeFischer thank you. the standard values on my system seem to be (after running pdflatex) Creator: LaTeX with hyperref and Producer: pdfTeX-1.40.21 – el_tenedor Mar 31 '21 at 19:17

1 Answers1

5

According to the PDF reference both should be set if a PDF is created by converting from another format. Then creator is the application which created the original document and producer the converter. E.g. if you convert from docx the Creator would be e.g. Word XY, and the producer for example some print to pdf driver.

If you create the PDF by using LaTeX together with some dvi-driver, then the creator is typically some variant of LaTeX and the producer e.g. xdvipdfmx or Ghostscript (which sets the producer automatically, you can't adjust this in the document).

It isn't quite clear if one should call a PDF creation with pdftex or luatex a conversion, but creator is here normally set to variant of LaTeX too, and the producer to the engine and its version.

If you create a PDF with Acrobat, it will set both to the name and version of the application: Adobe Acrobat XY

Ulrike Fischer
  • 327,261