How to know which fonts are used in selected part of a PDF document

I'm using Foxit Reader as default PDF viewer. How can I see what type of font is used for a selected part of a PDF document?

(If this can only be done with another software, I'd prefer a freeware as I don't want to pay for just viewing selected fonts' types.)

If you are using PDF-XChange Viewer, do this:

1. Select your text with the text selecting tool
2. Right-click the selection
3. Click on "Text Properties..."
4. Choose "Formatting" (on the left)
5. There is an arrow on the left of your selected text (which comes on the right part of the
   window)
6. You click on it and you get all the information you want.

Here's something very simple for unencrypted PDFs:

 strings my.pdf | grep FontName | cut -d '/' -f4

Try removing the "cut" part if it gives no meaningful results.

In both Foxit Reader and Adobe Reader if you go to File > Properties and then click on the Fonts tab you will be able to see a full list of fonts available in that document, however, there isn't any features in these basic PDF readers that will let you select some text and view the properties for that text to see exactly which font it uses.

For that you need Foxit PDF Editor, Adobe Acrobat or some other PDF editor.

In Adobe Acrobat X Pro (not for free), you can use the Edit Document Text tool to find out about the font:

1. Click Tools on the documents menubar in the top right corner to show the side menu of tools.
2. Open the Content area in the right sidebar and locate the Edit Document Text tool.
3. Select some text
4. Right-click and select Properties...
5. The Text tab of the properties dialog shows the font (you can also change it)

In Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro, you can use the TouchUp Text Tool which is found under (Tools > Advanced Editing > TouchUp Text Tool).

This might also work in other Acrobat versions, but the Tool might be buried somewhere else in Acrobat's menus.

I don't know of any way to do what you want other than using some very expensive commercial PDF processing software (such as Enfocus' PitStop or callas' pdfToolbox4).

The closest you can get is the pdffonts.exe commandline utility. That is contained in the XPDF-based tool collection, available here: http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/download.html (Download: ftp://ftp.foolabs.com/pub/xpdf/xpdfbin-win-3.03.zip ).

If you run

pdffonts.exe -f 22 -l 22 c:\path\to\some\pdf.pdf

the result will show all fonts used on page 22. To see all fonts used in the complete document, just run

pdffonts.exe c:\path\to\some\pdf.pdf