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In Acrobat Reader I can go to File > Properties to see all the metadata for the open PDF file: the program that created the document, author information, embedded fonts, etc.

OS X's Preview can also display metadata, albeit a more limited subset (under Tools > Show Inspector). However, you can't see embedded font information with Preview.

Is there a way in OS X (preferably with Preview, and not with Acrobat) to see what fonts are embedded in a PDF file?

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2 Answers 2

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Some PDF files may include the font name in plain text within the file.

To see this, run one of these commands from the terminal or command-line.

MacOS

strings /path/to/document.pdf | grep -i FontName

Note: MacOS might require you to install the command-line tools first.

Windows

findstr FontName C:\path\to\document.pdf
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  • 5
    This doesn't work for me on OSX 10.8.4; nothing matches FontName in the output of strings...
    – John J. Camilleri
    Aug 5, 2013 at 9:19
  • @JohnJ.Camilleri try strings /path/to/document.pdf | grep fontname
    – Baub
    Nov 13, 2014 at 18:33
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    @James that works but only sometimes; Specifically, it doesn't seem to work with PDFs created with pdflatex.
    – John J. Camilleri
    Nov 14, 2014 at 6:44
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    strings doesn't work for me on OS X 10.10.5 (even with the ignore case flag) - however pdffonts (see other answer) is perfect.
    – William Turrell
    Sep 3, 2015 at 8:26
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    I want to confirm that it worked fine in macOS Sierra 10.12.6. I will suggest simplifying pdf name. I tried strings ABC.pdf | grep FontName
    – Vikram Singh Saini
    Sep 19, 2017 at 7:08
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You can also use pdffonts, which can be installed with brew install poppler or brew install xpdf.

$ pdffonts file.pdf
name                                 type              encoding         emb sub uni object ID
------------------------------------ ----------------- ---------------- --- --- --- ---------
GFEDCB+MyriadSet-Medium              CID TrueType      Identity-H       yes yes yes    304  0
GFEDCB+MyriadSet-Bold                CID TrueType      Identity-H       yes yes yes    310  0
GFEDCB+MyriadSet-MediumItalic        CID TrueType      Identity-H       yes yes yes    659  0
GFEDCB+Menlo-Regular                 CID TrueType      Identity-H       yes yes yes    664  0
ZapfDingbats                         Type 1            Custom           no  no  yes    665  0
ZapfDingbats                         Type 1            Custom           no  no  yes    666  0
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    Thanks. You only need the popper bottle.
    – NVaughan
    Jul 5, 2016 at 21:46
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    Also via macports "sudo port install poppler".
    – Neal Young
    Sep 24, 2018 at 15:56
  • How does one make sense of font names such as "XSVTJR+CMSS12"?
    – David J.
    Jan 21, 2019 at 23:03
  • @DavidJ.: That looks like a subset font. CMSS12 is likely the true PostScript name of the original font, while XSVTJR+ is added to the beginning of the name to assure this particular subset of CMSS12 has a name that's unique to all other possible subsets. You can see this same behavior is reflected in Lri's output above (the GFEDCB+ prefix is used for several embedded subset fonts).
    – NSGod
    Oct 12, 2019 at 20:16
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    On Linux, the package is usually called poppler-utils or poppler_utils.
    – kirelagin
    Dec 31, 2021 at 20:16

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