TYPE DESIGN INFORMATION PAGE last updated on Thu May 23 22:31:49 EDT 2013



PDF font extraction

Written by Luc Devroye
McGill University
Montreal, Canada
lucdevroye@gmail.com
http://luc.devroye.org
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PDF font extraction used to be a simple thing until 2001. Most PDF files created after 2001 have only partial character sets, but most older PDF files have full type 1 or other font files. Mirko Scholz recommends the use of pdftosrc, part of the PDFTeX package. Alternately, one can use Acrobat3 (*not* higher versions) and output a PostScript file from a PDF file. Inspect the PostScript file to find the fonts, usually located between BeginResource and EndResource lines (or the line with "cleartomark"). You may have to add a header line (example: %!PS-AdobeFont-1.0: AmasisMT (001.003)). The PFA file (in case of type 1) needs to be converted to PFB using t1utils, a free package. Remember that no metrics (AFM, PFM) file can be extracted from a PDF file! Several utilities exist (e.g., Crossfont) that automatically generate a basic PFM file. See also the discussion here.

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INTERNAL LINKS
Extracting fonts from PDF files ⦿









Luc Devroye ⦿ School of Computer Science ⦿ McGill University Montreal, Canada H3A 2K6 ⦿ lucdevroye@gmail.com ⦿ http://luc.devroye.org ⦿ http://luc.devroye.org/fonts.html