[texhax] Determining the presentation package used from the pdf

[Heiko Oberdiek]

On Sun, Mar 18, 2012 at 11:16:03PM -0700, Suresh Govindachar wrote:

> 
> By examining a pdf presentation, is it possible to tell which TeX package
> (beamer, powerdot, or whatever) was used to create it?

In general no, but to some degree it can be guessed.

> If so, how?  If not,
> why don't creators of packages for presentation add such information into
> the final pdf?

You can put the classes, packages, ... (the stuff that \listfiles
outputs at the end of the LaTeX run) in the creator field
of the PDF informations:

\documentclass{beamer}

\makeatletter
\newcommand*{\FileList}{}
\begingroup
  \@for\@currname:=\@filelist\do{%
    \filename at parse\@currname
    \edef\reserved at a{%
      \filename at base.%
      \ifx\filename at ext\relax tex\else\filename at ext\fi
    }%
    \expandafter
    \let\expandafter\reserved at b\csname ver@\reserved at a\endcsname
    \ifx\reserved at b\relax
      \let\reserved at b\@empty
    \fi
    \ifx\FileList\@empty
    \else
      \xdef\FileList{\FileList, }%
    \fi
    \ifx\reserved at b\@empty
      \xdef\FileList{\FileList \reserved at a}%
    \else
      \xdef\FileList{\FileList \reserved at a\space(\reserved at b)}%
    \fi
  }%   
\endgroup
\hypersetup{pdfcreator=\FileList}% takes some time
\makeatother

\begin{document}
Hello World.  
\end{document}

But it's quite a lengthy list and some of the auxiliary files could be
filtered out.

Yours sincerely
  Heiko Oberdiek