How to check which fonts are used in a PDF document

Last updated on July 22, 2020 by Dan Nanni

To check what fonts are included or used in a PDF file, you can use a command-line utility called pdffonts, which is a PDF font analyzer tool. pdffonts is a part of Poppler PDF utilities package.

Install PDF Utilities on Linux

For Debian based Linux:

To install Poppler on Ubuntu, Debian or Linux Mint:

$ sudo apt-get install poppler-utils

For Red Hat based Linux:

To install Poppler on Fedora, CentOS or RHEL:

$ sudo yum install poppler-utils

Check PDF Fonts with pdffonts Tool

The command-line tool pdffonts can list all the fonts used in a PDF document. The basic usage of pdffonts is as follows.

$ pdffonts doc.pdf

The pdffonts tool shows various information about each font used, such as font name/type, or whether or not a font is embedded, etc.

In case of a multi-page PDF document, you can limit font scanning for a range of pages with -f (first page), and -l (last page) options. For example, if you want to find out which fonts are used in pages 5-10 of a document, run this:

$ pdffonts -f 5 -l 10 doc.pdf

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