[Tex/LaTex] How to find out what fonts are used in a document/picture

fonts

Is it possible to identify the font used in a specific document/picture?

Answers to this question should identify:

  • Possible methods to do this (perhaps one answer per method) and adequately describe how to use it (as opposed to merely stating it);
  • Ways of finding the identified fonts, if possible (free or not); and
  • Any prerequisites associated with the method used, if required (for example, "In order to use method X, your document has to be in format Y").

This question is meant as an FAQ, based on an original inquiry launched on meta. Its aim is to facilitate the community with the general procedures involved in font identification. Similar cases are solved on a per-usage basis on Graphic Design's {font-identification} tag.

Best Answer

For PDFs, I know of two ways you can find out the fonts of a file.

If you have Adobe Acrobat/Reader, you can find out the fonts used in the file by looking at the Fonts tab in the document's properties (CTRL+D or File->Properties->Fonts). There you will see a list of all the fonts used in the document. It can take several seconds to compile the entire list if a document uses many fonts. If you're using Evince as your PDF-viewer you can find the same function under the properties menu there as well.

You can use the tool pdffonts. This is included as part of xpdf, which is available in pre-compiled binaries for both Linux and Windows. The program's website says that people have reported being able to compile it on OS X and other systems.

To find out which fonts are used on a specific page, e.g. page 10, pdffonts offers the following command

pdffonts.exe -f 10 -l 10 "c:\file\path\myfile.pdf"

which can be put in loop to show the fonts page by page (here for Windows until page 100):

for /l %i in (1,1,100) do (echo.PAGE %i & "pdffonts.exe" -f %i -l %i "c:\file\path\myfile.pdf")
Related Question