Extracting font information from PDF files

Has a client ever sent you a PDF and you needed to know what typeface they used on the heading? I show you how to find out!

Recently I was sent a PDF of a marketing poster which a client had asked me to turn into a HTML email. The design firm who had produced the poster had used a non web standard font (ie: not Arial, Verdana or the like) but I still wanted to use it as my primary typeface in my font stack (the CSS font-family rule) and allow the typeface to degrade for those users who didn't have it installed on their system. The problem was that I didn't recognise the font!

Having exhausted all other avenues, I turned to my boss, who promptly showed me the following technique to extract font information from a PDF:

Open your PDF.
Go to TOOLS -> Advanced Editing and select the "TouchUp Text Tool".
Click on the text that you wish to extract the typeface from and a bounding box should appear.
Highlight a portion of the text and right click to bring up a menu. Select "Properties".
Information about your font should be displayed under the "Text" tab, including the font name. Easy!

The one issue with this technique is that - to the best of my knowledge - you need to have Adobe Acrobat Professional (I used Version 8.1.2) to use the advanced editing functionality.

If hope you find this useful, and if you do be sure to comment.

David

Posted years ago by David Smith

David is a web designer and a front end developer for DeepBlueSky Digital. He's reponsible for designing nice things and then making sure they don't break in Internet Explorer. Currently he's mostly interested in javascript and HTML5. You can follow Dave on Twitter as @get_dave or @deepbluetweets.

7 Comments on this post

tom said “latex” a few months ago

good stuff, useful for fonts in documents from latex!
Stephan said “Thanks!” a few months ago

Great tutorial and just what I was looking for. The properties even give you the stroke weight. Thank you!
stefan said “Extract font from pdf” a few months ago

You are able to extract fonts from PDF with Online Font Converter
Marko said “recognizeing fonts in pdf” a few months ago

What if font is converted to outlines before saving to pdf?
Magnus said “Use Word?” a few months ago

If you just copy the text from the PDF (I used Adobe Reader), and paste it into Word the font-name will show. But the font-type is of course incorrect!
Russ said “Thanks” a few months ago

Thank you, really nice tip. Works just great!
Matt said “Thanks!” last month

Perfect - I am also extracting from a PDF and turning into an HTML email. Exactly what I needed!