PDF metadata says the file was created in a browser. is that normal?
Short answer, for anyone who finds this from a search: no.
Longer version. A COA from an actual laboratory is exported from instrument software or from a LIMS. The PDF producer string reflects that. What it does not usually say is the name of a web browser, a word processor, or an online PDF editor.
The document I am looking at — TFC, and to be clear I think this one is a reseller's re-export rather than a forgery — has a creation timestamp four months after the analysis date printed on the page. That could be a re-issue. It could also be nothing. But it is checkable in about fifteen seconds and almost nobody checks.
How to look: open the PDF properties, or run strings on it and grep for Producer and CreationDate.
best — the order this archive was captured in
This is the cheapest check available and it catches a genuinely surprising amount. The pattern I see most is not a forged report — it is a real report that has been through three hands and had a logo pasted over it.
Which is worth distinguishing, because "reseller re-exported a genuine document" and "somebody generated a document" are very different accusations and this community has to be careful about which one it is making.
yes, and that distinction is why i flaired this Suspicious rather than Confirmed. the metadata is odd. that is all i am claiming.
Correct flair, correct restraint, thank you. For everyone else: this is what an unresolved observation looks like. Confirmed means documentary evidence of the thing you are alleging, not a suspicious field.
We have had to retract two accusations in three years and both times the underlying observation was real and the conclusion drawn from it was not.
and both retractions are still on the source pages, annotated. that is on purpose.
the fact that the retractions stay up is genuinely the reason i trust the rest of the directory.
That is exactly the trade. A record you can edit silently is not a record.
same energy as reverse-searching the facility photos. about half of them are stock libraries and about a tenth are a different company entirely.
my favourite version of this: a document dated before the domain was registered.
that one is beautiful and i have never caught it myself
worth adding that instrument software exports are often ugly — bad fonts, fixed-width tables, no branding. an immaculately designed COA is mildly suspicious on aesthetic grounds alone. edit: not evidence, just a smell.
plenty of legitimate labs re-export to PDF. this whole post is vibes.
they do, and the post says so twice. the claim is that it is worth fifteen seconds of checking, not that a producer string convicts anyone.
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