How to find out WHERE a specific font is used in a PDF document

Question

For a given PDF which uses a number of fonts (e.g., in Acrobat Reader, the fonts used can be seen when selecting Files > Properties > Fonts) how can I find out where a certain font is used in the document (using Adobe Acrobat 7, Reader, or a free PDF tool)

Just to be clear: I don't want to find which font is used on a certain piece of text (I know how to do that using Acrobat 9 Professional, see this Super User question). Instead I want to find where a specific font is used.

Answer 1

I have used Enfocus' Pitstop Pro plugin for this, but it's not cheap.

Answer 2

Here is a way how to find out for each individual page which set of fonts is used on it. (Sorry, I don't know a way to make the location-awareness for font usage more specific than page-wise without resorting to expansive commercial software such as callassoftware.com's pdfToolbox4 or Enfocus' PitStop.)

This method use XPDF's pdffonts.exe utility, a GPL-licensed Free Software:

1. Go to: http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/download.html and download: ftp://ftp.foolabs.com/pub/xpdf/xpdf-3.02pl4-win32.zip .
2. Extract the *.zip file to some directory and locate the various *.exe utilities contained therein.

3. Now, to show all fonts used on page 22 of a document, run:

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

4. To see all fonts used in the complete document, just run:

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

5. To obtain a list of fonts used on each page of a 22-page PDF, just use:

   for /l %i in (1,1,22) do ^
         (echo.PAGE %i & pdffonts -f %i -l %i c:\path\to\some\pdf.pdf)
   

Answer 3

Somewhere in the internet I found this other method that works, if you have Adobe Acrobat (I think this works after 7).

Find Tools>Edit Document Text (I am reading from my Acrobat 10X, it may be different in your version, but you should be able to find what I'm talking about)

Once a box of text is selected, right-click and look at the properties. There, it will say the font used.

edited: found the link to my reference: http://www.deepbluesky.com/blog/-/extracting-font-information-from-pdf-files_35/