PDF format. function of %-started sequence

Question

What is a function of hex sequence "25 E2 E3 CF D3", found at the beginning of some documents? It should be a comment as far as I understand, but it's content is not any meaningful text and the same sequence occurs in many documents.

Answer 1

It identifies the PDF file as containing binary data.

From the freely available PDF Reference (section 7.5.2, p. 40):

If a PDF file contains binary data, as most do (see 7.2, "Lexical Conventions"), the header line shall be immediately followed by a comment line containing at least four binary characters—that is, characters whose codes are 128 or greater. This ensures proper behaviour of file transfer applications that inspect data near the beginning of a file to determine whether to treat the file’s contents as text or as binary.