DeepBlueSky Blog

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

23 Comments on this post

tom said “latex” years ago

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

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

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

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

Perfect - I am also extracting from a PDF and turning into an HTML email. Exactly what I needed!
Caron said “Thanks!” years ago

your post helped me to solve this exact same problem!
Blaz said “Thanks!” last year

Thanks 4 the help,

I really needed it!

So simple, so hidden...
Sheila said “PDF font properties” last year

Hi

This was exactly what I needed today.

Thanks

Sheila
diana said “used it to solve mystery” last year

like magic - thanx! I had thought impossible to duplicate what looked like an original hand-drawn text - this showed my it was just a rare font.
Rob said “Simple!” last year

Just what I needed! Thank you!
Felix said “PDF font extract” last year

Very interesting method you have presented here. I am a graphic designer and I work mainly for auto industry. They use special fonts for every icon in the car. I had this problem a few months ago. At that time it was very little information about this subject online. After a lot of researching I have developed a procedure to extract any type of font embedded in any pdf file. I will present my method on my blog on http://pdffontextract.blogspot... so people can use it and solve their problems. Glad to help you guys!
jonathan said “CSS3 & HTML5, Digital Marketing, Analytics & SEO” last year

this is good
Iara Falcao said “font information on PDF file” last year

It was just what I needed! All morning I was trying to figure that up when I decided to go to Google and I found you Thank you!
Paul said “Extracting font info” last year

Thanks. Just the job and a big help.
alexandra said “many thanks for helping figure out font style on a pdf” last year

You rock!!
Fep said “Help Me in this” last year

the things what u shared is useful for me. thanks.

actually i got a sanskrit book and for the same procedure it display as "there is no such system file" will u help u outta this??
Bas said “get fontname in pdf” last year

Never knew you could just select and see which font(s) are used inside a PDF. Thanks for sharing!
Minerva said “Extracting a font from a PDF” last year

This was exactly what I needed. Thanks so much!
Lisa said “Extracting font information from pdf files” last year

Yeeeeeiiiiii!! thanks so much! great tip!!
pat said “Finding a font size in a PDF document.” last year

This document was very helpful. Thanks for posting it.
ANTÓNIO said “Just what I needed! ” a few months ago

Thanks