Producer property

Producer returns the Info dictionary’s /Producer entry (PDF 1.7 spec section 14.3.3). The string identifies the software component that wrote the PDF bytes — typically a PDF rendering / conversion engine such as “Adobe PDF Library 17.0”, “Microsoft: Print To PDF”, “Skia/PDF m126”, “GPL Ghostscript 10.02”, or “iText 8.0.2”. Compare with Creator, which describes the originating authoring application (Word, InDesign, …).

The value is decoded UTF-16 and may be empty when the Info dictionary is missing or when Active is False. Both /Producer and /Creator are optional in the spec but virtually every modern PDF declares /Producer because PDF generators write it automatically.

Producer is a strong signal for routing decisions: scanned-then-OCR’d PDFs typically advertise a TWAIN scanner driver, screen-captured PDFs show “Microsoft: Print To PDF”, while authoring-tool exports name a known conversion library. Newer PDFs may also mirror this value in XMP metadata as pdf:Producer; the two should agree but historically drift apart after incremental updates.

• This property is read-only; rewriting it requires the lower-level FPDF_SetMetaText PDFium API.
• Producer strings are not standardised — do not rely on exact substring matches across versions of the same engine.
• Combine with PdfVersion for forensic identification of malformed or suspicious PDFs that report mismatched producer / spec versions.