Check which font types are used in a particular PDF page

Question

I have to check a .pdf document that consists of a large number of pages. I would like to be able to find which font type is used in which place in order to check the consistency across the document.

Answer 1

As far as I know, you can see a list of fonts used in the pdf, in the document properties dialog (File>Properties, or ctrl/cmd+D) on the "Fonts" tab.

But the list doesn't indicate on which page the particular font is used, at least not in Adobe Reader. Maybe there is such an option in Acrobat Pro, or some other pdf reader?

Answer 2

My recommendation is to start with the pdffonts utility. (Later you could move to a more advanced tool, like tet from pdflib.com should the first step not suffice for you).

pdffonts is a commandline tool available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. It comes as part of XPDF (or as an alternative implementation from XPDF's fork called 'poppler'). Download the XPDF utils for Windows here (on Linux they should be pre-installed on most systems).

Try this to get familiar with the tool (I'm assuming you're on Windows):

pdffonts.exe -h

Then, run it against your PDF file to get a first overview of all the fonts used:

pdffonts.exe d:\path\to\your.pdf

Now we want to see which fonts are on pages 11-13:

pdffonts.exe -f 11 -l 13 d:\path\to\your.pdf

You want the fonts on page 15?

pdffonts.exe -f 15 -l 15 d:\path\to\your.pdf

Or you want a list of fonts used page by page? Ok, then you need to know how many pages your PDF has. Assuming it is 1234 pages:

for /l %i in (1,1,1234) do (echo. &^
echo. Page %i:&^
echo. ============&^
pdffonts -f %i -l %i d:\path\to\your.pdf&^
echo.) 

On Linux, change that command to:

for i in $(seq 1 1234); do
    echo " Page ${i}:"
    echo " ============"
    pdffonts -f ${i} -l ${i} /path/to/your.pdf
    echo
done 

You should now see output looking something like this:

 Page 1:
 ============
name                                 type              emb sub uni object ID
------------------------------------ ----------------- --- --- --- ---------
DDPEFM+Helvetica                     Type 1C           yes yes no  124352  0
DDPEIM+Helvetica-Bold                Type 1C           yes yes no  124354  0

 Page 2:
 ============
name                                 type              emb sub uni object ID
------------------------------------ ----------------- --- --- --- ---------
DDPEIM+Helvetica-Bold                Type 1C           yes yes no  124354  0
DDPEFM+Helvetica                     Type 1C           yes yes no  124352  0
Arial-BoldMT                         TrueType          no  no  no    3543  0
ArialMT                              TrueType          no  no  no    3541  0

 Page 3:
 ============
name                                 type              emb sub uni object ID
------------------------------------ ----------------- --- --- --- ---------
DDPEFM+Helvetica                     Type 1C           yes yes no  124352  0
DDPEIM+Helvetica-Bold                Type 1C           yes yes no  124354  0
Arial-BoldMT                         TrueType          no  no  no    3543  0
ArialMT                              TrueType          no  no  no    3541  0

For the exact meaning of the different columns, see man pdffonts on Linux, or read the textfile pdfinfo.txt on Windows.