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?

Answer 1

Try Foxit PDF Reader. You can display the list of fonts used in the "File" menu with the item "Properties...".

Answer 2

using the free iText (or iTextSharp if you're on .NET) you can write a utility that will extract for you this information using the BaseFont.GetDocumentFonts method.

Read this link for the code

Answer 3

pdffonts command line tool from Xpdf

Answer 4

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.

Answer 5

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

Answer 6

You can extract font from PDF using Online Font Converter: http://onlinefontconverter.com/extract_font_from_pdf.php