How to know the font used in a PDF file?

I want to know what font is used in a PDF file. I use Foxit reader. How can I find out which font has been used to make this document?

14k 1 1 gold badge 24 24 silver badges 34 34 bronze badges asked Jun 3, 2020 at 22:24 political science political science 287 1 1 gold badge 9 9 silver badges 24 24 bronze badges No matter which reader you use, you can see the font used in the document in the file properties. Commented Jun 4, 2020 at 8:00

2 Answers 2

Open that pdf file on Foxit Reader and go to File->Properties->Fonts, at this point you now can know which the fonts embedded in one.

Important: There are several fonts in that document. For example, some those ones are Helvetica, Heveltica-Bond.

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answered Jun 3, 2020 at 23:07 Jorge Luiz Jorge Luiz 705 5 5 silver badges 12 12 bronze badges

when I downloaded those font from internet I guess Chandan font is mainly used so upon copy pasting the text in Word with that font installed the text is garbled.

Commented Jun 4, 2020 at 18:15

@politicalscience garbled text might be an artifact of the encoding or the formatting. Try first pasting the text into Notepad (which does no formatting), then copy it from Notepad and copy that into Word. Also, some PDFs have (pseudo-)*kerning* issues - this is sometimes used as a form of protection. Can you describe (better still, screenshot) what "garbled" means?

Commented Jun 5, 2020 at 16:08

If the font is not already displayed in the application (status bar, info window, etc.), probably your best bet is to copy the PDF into another file and give it extension ".txt". Then open the new file using Notepad or some simple text editor.

You will see a lot of garbage mixed with small pieces of text. This is the internal structure of the PDF file, made up of objects organized in a hierarchy.

Look for the string "/BaseFont". You'll almost surely see several of them:

/BaseFont/TimesNewRomanPS-BoldMT/FirstChar 32/Encoding/WinAnsiEncoding/Type/Font. /BaseFont/Georgia#20Bold/FirstChar 0/LastChar 255/Encoding /WinAnsiEncoding.

As you can see, the item immediately after the "/BaseFont" directive is the internal font name. The same operation, in a more reliable and professional way, is performed by several software utilities.

Otherwise, a different method is taking a screenshot of the PDF, and upload it onto some service like WhatTheFont. This has the added advantage that you might be able to locate a font similar to the one you want, even if an exact match is not available.