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.
2 Answers
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.
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?