How to find out which fonts are referenced and which are embedded in a PDF document

Question

We have a little problem with fonts in PDF documents. In order to put the finger on the problem I'd like to inspect, which fonts are actually embedded in the pdf document and which are only referenced. Is there an easy (and cheap as in free) way to do that?

vartec · Answer 1 · 2014-01-28T21:03:53.110

182

pdffonts command line tool originally from Xpdf, now part of Poppler.

This tool is available in most Linux distributions as part of poppler-utils package.

Example usage and output:

$ pdffonts some.pdf 

name                                 type              emb sub uni object ID
------------------------------------ ----------------- --- --- --- ---------
BAAAAA+Arial-Black                   TrueType          yes yes yes     53  0
CAAAAA+Tahoma                        TrueType          yes yes yes     28  0
DAAAAA+Wingdings-Regular             TrueType          yes yes yes     43  0
EAAAAA+Webdings                      TrueType          yes yes yes     38  0
FAAAAA+Arial-BoldMT                  TrueType          yes yes yes     33  0
GAAAAA+Tahoma-Bold                   TrueType          yes yes yes     23  0
HAAAAA+OpenSymbol                    TrueType          yes yes yes     48  0

edited Jan 28 '14 at 21:03

answered Mar 05 '09 at 13:12

vartec

131,205
36
218
244

to avoid linkrot, please include an example and/or some doc. – Jake Berger Jan 28 '14 at 18:49
It seems to have been installed by default on my Lubuntu 14.10 installation. – DaAwesomeP Mar 22 '15 at 22:41
13

For mac users, `brew install poppler` to easily get the `pdffonts` command – Edward Newell Mar 02 '16 at 03:00
1

In evince document viewer, go to File --> properties --> Fonts tab – Lnux Dec 17 '16 at 05:53
Note: on Windows, pdffonts can be installed as part of the Poppler chocolatey package https://chocolatey.org/packages/poppler – Bernard Vander Beken Mar 03 '21 at 09:41
Veery late to the party, but is there a way to extract the font size as well in a similar way? – Vegard Gjeldvik Jervell Jan 31 '22 at 13:41
`pdffonts file.pdf | cut -d ' ' -f1 | uniq -d` – ahmelq Jul 03 '23 at 14:31

score 97 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 27 '11 at 19:59

97

Much simpler if you just want to find out the font names: run this from a terminal

strings yourPDFfilepath.pdf | grep FontName

answered Jan 27 '11 at 19:59

michelem

995
6
2

12

Windows: findstr FontName yourPDFfilepath.pdf – Craigo May 25 '12 at 03:57
13

Doesn't work for me. (Mac with PDF generated by latex.) `pdffonts` shows two embedded fonts; this shows none. Evidently, this method works some times, but is not reliable. – Mike Apr 22 '13 at 14:49
try with lowercase f on fontName – Ken Aspeslagh Nov 27 '13 at 20:48
@texnic Try this. Right click and open the file in a text editor (e.g. Notepad) and search for FontName. – Kevin Lee Apr 19 '17 at 04:07
`FontName` wasn't found in a PDF I just tried. Just looking for `grep -i font` gave : `/BaseFont /Helvetica` – Eric Duminil Jun 29 '21 at 08:46

score 52 · Accepted Answer · edited Mar 06 '09 at 10:34

52

I finally got an example file that actually seems to have fonts embedded.

Using the normal Adobe Reader (or Foxit if you prefer). Select File->Properties on the resulting Dialog choose the Font tab. You will see a list of fonts. The ones that are embedded will state this fact in ( ) behind the font name.

edited Mar 06 '09 at 10:34

Aaron Digulla

321,842
108
597
820

answered Mar 05 '09 at 13:26

Jens Schauder

77,657
34
181
348

Does this tab exist in the Mac version? I can't find it, I have a Mac ) : – Derrops Sep 30 '21 at 04:18

score 5 · Answer 4 · answered Mar 13 '09 at 02:07

CAM::PDF has a font reporter, available as a command-line utility or via a library call. If you run "listfont.pl file.pdf" you get output like this:

Page 1:
  Name: F1.0
    Type: TrueType
    BaseFont: NZUXSR+Impact
    Encoding: MacRomanEncoding
    Widths: yes
      Characters: 0-255
    Embedded: yes
  Name: F2.0
    Type: TrueType
    BaseFont: XSFKRA+ArialMT
    Encoding: MacRomanEncoding
    Widths: yes
      Characters: 0-255
    Embedded: yes

How to find out which fonts are referenced and which are embedded in a PDF document

4 Answers4

Linked