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

pdf fonts
Jens Schauder picture Jens Schauder · Mar 5, 2009 · Viewed 86.7k times · Source

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?

Answer

vartec picture vartec · Mar 5, 2009

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

Related questions

How can I extract embedded fonts from a PDF as valid font files?

I'm aware of the pdftk.exe utility that can indicate which fonts are used by a PDF, and wether they are embedded or not. Now the problem: given I had PDF files with embedded fonts -- how can I extract …

Read More
How to implement custom fonts in TCPDF

In TCPDF, there are only a few fonts to choose from, to create pdf files. I want to set Tahoma as my pdf font. How can I include Tahoma in TCPDF??

Read More
How to repair a PDF file and embed missing fonts

I use pdftk to repair some failures in corrupted PDF files, but I faced another problem which is not fixed by pdftk (or at least I do not know how to do so). I have PDF files with text based …

Read More