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

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