View list of embedded fonts in PDF file with Preview

Question

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?

Solution 1

Run either command 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

Solution 2

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

Comments

[Admin]

You may want to see this question: stackoverflow.com/questions/614619/… (answer from michelem)

[Baub]

@JohnJ.Camilleri try strings /path/to/document.pdf | grep fontname

[John J. Camilleri]

@James that works but only sometimes; Specifically, it doesn't seem to work with PDFs created with pdflatex.

[Stephen]

Didn't work well for me either (on mac). On linux, pdffonts was so nice.

[Ariel]

One other argument I would add after grep would be "-i". So the command would be: strings /path/to/document.pdf | grep -i fontname. This argument ignores any specific casing and catches variants such as fontName FontName fontname FontName and so on.

[William Turrell]

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.

[NVaughan]

Thanks. You only need the popper bottle.

[YudhiWidyatama]

I think if the PDF is compressed then the string could be mangled beyond recognition

[Vikram Singh Saini]

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

[Neal Young]

Also via macports "sudo port install poppler".

[David J.]

How does one make sense of font names such as "XSVTJR+CMSS12"?

[NSGod]

@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).

[orome]

This doesn't work for me either, but Lri's answer does. That should be the accepted answer.

[kirelagin]

On Linux, the package is usually called poppler-utils or poppler_utils.