Xpdf - PDFfonts - Command Line Utility to List Fonts Used in a PDF File

1. Download the software

You may have already downloaded and unzipped the Xpdf tools while watching the first video in the Xpdf series, but if you haven't, then visit the Xpdf website. Click the Download link and then click the pre-compiled Windows binary ZIP archive to download the utilities for Windows.

2. Locate the documentation folder for the Xpdf utilities

Go to the folder where you unzipped the downloaded ZIP file and find the doc folder.

3. Read the documentation for the PDFfonts tool

Go into the doc folder and find the plain text file called pdffonts.txt.

Open it with any text editor, such as Notepad, and read it. This is the documentation for the PDFfonts tool.

4. Set up a test folder

Create a test folder.

Copy pdffonts.exe from the unzipped bin32 folder into your test folder.

Copy a couple of sample PDF files into your test folder, preferably ones with many different fonts.

5. Set up a command prompt for testing

Open a command prompt window.

Navigate to your test folder.

Issue a DIR command in the command prompt to be sure that only the PDFfonts executable and the sample PDF files are in it.

6. Run the PDFfonts utility

Issue the following command in the command prompt:

pdffonts NameOfYourTestFile.pdf

If you receive the following error messages, ignore them:
Config Error: No display font for 'Symbol'
Config Error: No display font for 'ZapfDingbats'

7. Observe the output from PDFfonts

8. Run the PDFfonts utility again, but this time redirect the output to a file

Issue the following command in the command prompt:

pdffonts NameOfYourTestFile.pdf>fonts.txt

9. Verify that the output of the PDFfonts utility went into the file

Open the text file created in the previous step with any text editor, such as Notepad.

10. View the fonts in a PDF editor/reader/viewer

You may, of course, show the fonts in a PDF editor/reader/viewer, such as Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Reader, usually via File>Properties>Fonts, but they are not command line tools and there is no easy way to get the information into a file.


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