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

Question

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.)

Answer 1

In Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro (not for free), you can use the TouchUp Text Tool to find out the font:

1. Tools > Advanced Editing > TouchUp Text Tool
2. Select some text
3. Right-click the selected text > Properties
4. The Text tab of the properties dialog shows the font (you can also change it)

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

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

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/xpdf-3.02pl4-win32.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

Answer 4

Meanwhile I found a different method to list fonts used in a PDF (and indicate wether they're embedded or not), which uses Ghostscript only (no need for additional third party utilities). Unfortunately this also does NOT satisfy your requirement to learn about a font used for highlighted text.

This method uses a little utility program, written in PostScript, shipping with the source code of Ghostscript. Look in the toolbin subdir for the pdf_info.ps file.

The included comments say you should run it like this in order to list fonts used, media sizes used

gs -dNODISPLAY ^
   -q ^
   -sFile=____.pdf ^
   [-dDumpMediaSizes] ^
   [-dDumpFontsUsed [-dShowEmbeddedFonts]] ^
   toolbin/pdf_info.ps

I did run it on a local example file. Here is the result:

C:\> gswin32c ^
      -dNODISPLAY ^
      -q ^
      -sFile=SHARE.pdf ^
      -dDumpMediaSizes ^
      -dDumpFontsUsed ^
      -dShowEmbeddedFonts ^
      C:\\pa\\gs\\gs8.64\\lib\\pdf_info.ps

SHARE.pdf has 12 pages.
Title: SHARE_Information_070808.indd
Creator: Adobe InDesign CS2 (4.0)
Producer: Adobe PDF Library 7.0
CreationDate: D:20080808103516+02'00'
ModDate: D:20080808103534+02'00'
Trapped: False

Page 1 MediaBox: [ 595.276 841.89 ] CropBox: [ 595.276 841.89 ]
Page 2 MediaBox: [ 595.276 841.89 ] CropBox: [ 595.276 841.89 ]
Page 3 MediaBox: [ 595.276 841.89 ] CropBox: [ 595.276 841.89 ]
Page 4 MediaBox: [ 595.276 841.89 ] CropBox: [ 595.276 841.89 ]
Page 5 MediaBox: [ 595.276 841.89 ] CropBox: [ 595.276 841.89 ]
Page 6 MediaBox: [ 595.276 841.89 ] CropBox: [ 595.276 841.89 ]
Page 7 MediaBox: [ 595.276 841.89 ] CropBox: [ 595.276 841.89 ]
Page 8 MediaBox: [ 595.276 841.89 ] CropBox: [ 595.276 841.89 ]
Page 9 MediaBox: [ 595.276 841.89 ] CropBox: [ 595.276 841.89 ]
Page 10 MediaBox: [ 595.276 841.89 ] CropBox: [ 595.276 841.89 ]
Page 11 MediaBox: [ 595.276 841.89 ] CropBox: [ 595.276 841.89 ]
Page 12 MediaBox: [ 595.276 841.89 ] CropBox: [ 595.276 841.89 ]

Font or CIDFont resources used:
DKCTOS+FrutigerLT-BlackCn
DKCTOS+FrutigerLT-BoldItalic
DKCTOS+Wingdings3
TIELEM+FrutigerLT-Black
TIELEM+FrutigerLT-Bold
TIELEM+FrutigerLT-BoldCn
TIELEM+FrutigerLT-Cn
TIELEM+FrutigerLT-Italic
TIELEM+FrutigerLT-UltraBlack
TIELEM+TimesNewRomanPS-BoldItalicMT

Answer 5

If the font is installed on your computer, then maybe copying the text to some word processor does the trick? And even when not installed, some word processors might still show the requested name in their font dialog.

(Other than that: a screen capture and WhatTheFont! might help, if it's worth the trouble. Or select the text, and then "print" the selection to a new PDF document, to see what its font properties shows then?)

Answer 6

Rowan's answer is fine, and if you really need to narrow it down to a small portion of a complex document, try to re-print a subset to another PDF (there are excellent free PDF printers, if you don't have one), and check the font properties of the resulting file.