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

Solution 1:

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:

Much simpler if you just want to find out the font names: run this from a terminal

strings yourPDFfilepath.pdf | grep FontName

Solution 3:

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.