How to find out which fonts are referenced and which are embedded in a PDF document
PdfFontsPdf Problem Overview
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?
Pdf Solutions
Solution 1 - Pdf
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
Solution 2 - Pdf
Much simpler if you just want to find out the font names: run this from a terminal
strings yourPDFfilepath.pdf | grep FontName
Solution 3 - Pdf
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.
Solution 4 - Pdf
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