How can I extract embedded fonts from a PDF as valid font files

Question

I m aware of the pdftk exe utility that can indicate which fonts are used by a PDF  and wether they are embedded or not   Now the problem  given I had PDF files with embedded fonts -- how can I extract those fonts in a way that they are re-usable as regular font files  Are there  preferably free  tools which can do that  Also  can this be done programmatically with  say  iText

User · Answer

One of the best online tools currently available to extract pdf fonts is http   www pdfconvertonline com extract-pdf-fonts-online html

User · Answer

Use online service http   www extractpdf com  No need to install anything

User · Answer

PDF2SVG version 6 0 from PDFTron does a reasonable job  It produces OpenType   otf  fonts by default  Use --preserve fontnames to preserve  the font font-family naming scheme as obtained from the source file    PDF2SVG is a commercial product  but you can download a free demo executable  which includes watermarks on the SVG output but doesn t otherwise restrict usage   There may be other PDFTron products that also extract fonts  but I only recently discovered PDF2SVG myself

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Even though this question is 10 years old  it is still valid and as technology changes so does a valid answer   In searching the current answers noticed none of them note WOFF  Web Open Font Format   W3C   Wikipedia  which can be used to recreate the individual characters  glyphs  and display them in a web page accurately   Using the free online web page by IDR Solutions  PDF to HTML5  link   convert a PDF to a zip file  In the resulting zip will be a font directory of woff file types  Current Internet browsers support woff files if you were not aware   reference  These can be examined at the online site FontDrop   link    WOFF files can be converted to from OTF or TTF at WOFFer     WOFF font converter  Also the zip file from PDF to HTML5 will contain an HTML file for each page of the PDF that can be opened in an Internet browser and is one of the best and most accurate PDF translations I have found or seen    While I am just learning how to use WOFF files  this is worth passing along  Enjoy   PS  I will probably update with more info as I learn more about using woff file types  but as this is creative commons  feel free to edit this answer if you have something of value to pass along

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You have several options  All these methods work on Linux as well as on Windows or Mac OS X  However  be aware that most PDFs do not include to full  complete fontface when they have a font embedded  Mostly they include just the subset of glyphs used in the document   Using pdftops One of the most frequently used methods to do this on  nix systems consists of the following steps   Convert the PDF to PostScript  for example by using XPDF s pdftops  on Windows  pdftops exe helper program  Now fonts will be embedded in  pfa  PostScript  format   you can extract them using a text editor  You may need to convert the  pfa  ASCII  to a  pfb  binary  file using the t1utils and pfa2pfb  In PDFs there are never  pfm or  afm files  font metric files  embedded  because PDF viewer have internal knowledge about these   Without these  font files are hardly usable in a visually pleasing way    Using fontforge Another method is to use the Free font editor FontForge   Use the  quot Open Font quot  dialogbox used when opening files  Then select  quot Extract from PDF quot  in the filter section of dialog  Select the PDF file with the font to be extracted  A  quot Pick a font quot  dialogbox opens -- select here which font to open   Check the FontForge manual  You may need to follow a few specific steps which are not necessarily straightforward in order to save the extracted font data as a file which is re-usable   Using mupdf Next  MuPDF  This application comes with a utility called pdfextract  on Windows  pdfextract exe  which can extract fonts and images from PDFs   In case you don t know about MuPDF  which still is relatively unknown and new   quot MuPDF is a Free lightweight PDF viewer and toolkit written in portable C  quot   written by Artifex Software developers  the same company that gave us Ghostscript    Update  Newer versions of MuPDF have moved the former functionality of  pdfextract  to the command  mutool extract   Download it here  mupdf com downloads  Note  pdfextract exe is a command-line program  To use it  do the following  c   gt   pdfextract exe  c  path to filename pdf            on Windows    gt     pdfextract   path tofilename pdf                   on Linux  Unix  Mac OS X   This command will dump all of the extractable files from the pdf file referenced into the current directory  Generally you will see a variety of files   images as well as fonts  These include PNG  TTF  CFF  CID  etc  The image names will be like img-0412 png if the PDF object number of the image was 412  The fontnames will be like FGETYK LinLibertineI-0966 ttf  if the font s PDF object number was 966  CFF  Compact Font Format  files are a recognized format that can be converted to other formats via a variety of converters for use on different operating systems  Again  be aware that most of these font files may have only a subset of characters and may not represent the complete typeface  Update   Jul 2013   Recent versions of mupdf have seen an internal reshuffling and renaming of their binaries  not just once  but several times  The main utility used to be a  swiss knife -alike binary called mubusy  name inspired by busybox    which more recently was renamed to mutool  These support the sub-commands info  clean  extract  poster and show  Unfortunatey  the official documentation for these tools isn t up to date  yet   If you re on a Mac using  MacPorts   then the utility was renamed in order to avoid name clashes with other utilities using identical names  and you may need to use mupdfextract  To achieve the  roughly  equivalent results with mutool as its previous tool pdfextract did  just run mubusy extract       So to extract fonts and images  you may need to run one of the following commandlines  c   gt   mutool exe extract filename pdf         on Windows    gt     mutool     extract filename pdf         on Linux  Unix  Mac OS X   Downloads are here  mupdf com downloads  Using gs  Ghostscript  Then  Ghostscript can also extract fonts directly from PDFs  However  it needs the help of a special utility program named extractFonts ps  written in PostScript language  which is available from the Ghostscript source code repository  Now use it  you need to run both  this file extractFonts ps and your PDF file  Ghostscript will then use the instructions from the PostScript program to extract the fonts from the PDF  It looks like this on Windows  yes  Ghostscript understands the  forward slash      as a path separator also on Windows    gswin32c exe                      -q -dNODISPLAY                   c  path to extractFonts ps     -c  quot  c  path to your PDFFile pdf  extractFonts quit quot   or on Linux  Unix or Mac OS X  gs                              -q -dNODISPLAY                  path to extractFonts ps     -c  quot   path to your PDFFile pdf  extractFonts quit quot   I ve tested the Ghostscript method a few years ago  At the time it did extract   ttf  TrueType  just fine  I don t know if other font types will also be extracted at all  and if so  in a re-usable way  I don t know if the utility does block extracting of fonts which are marked as protected   Using pdf-parser py Finally  Didier Stevens  pdf-parser py  this one is probably not as easy to use  because you need to have some know-how about internal PDF structures  pdf-parser py is a Python script which can do a lot of other things too  It can also decompress and extract arbitrary streams from objects  and therefore it can extract embedded font files too  But you need to know what to look for  Let s see it with an example  I have a file named big pdf  As a first step I use the -s parameter to search the PDF for any occurrence of the keyword FontFile  pdf-parser py does not require a case sensitive search   pdf-parser py -s fontfile big pdf  In my case  for my big1 pdf  I get this result  obj 9 0  Type   FontDescriptor  Referencing  15 0 R    lt  lt          Ascent 728      CapHeight 716      Descent -210       Flags 32      FontBBox   -665 -325 2000 1006        FontFile2 15 0 R      FontName  ArialMT      ItalicAngle 0      StemV 87      Type  FontDescriptor      XHeight 519    gt  gt      obj 11 0   Type   FontDescriptor  Referencing  16 0 R    lt  lt          Ascent 728      CapHeight 716      Descent -210       Flags 262176      FontBBox   -628 -376 2000 1018        FontFile2 16 0 R      FontName  Arial-BoldMT      ItalicAngle 0      StemV 165      Type  FontDescriptor      XHeight 519    gt  gt      It tells me that there are two instances of FontFile2 inside the PDF  and these are in PDF objects no  15 and no  16  respectively  Object no  15 holds the  FontFile2 for font  ArialMT  object no  16 holds the  FontFile2 for font  Arial-BoldMT  To show this more clearly  pdf-parser py -s fontfile big1 pdf   grep -i fontfile    FontFile2 15 0 R    FontFile2 16 0 R  A quick peeking into the PDF specification reveals the the keyword  FontFile2 relates to a   stream containing a TrueType font program    FontFile would relate to a  stream containing a Type 1 font program  and  FontFile3 would relate to a  stream containing a font program whose format is specified by the Subtype entry in the stream dictionary   hence being either a Type1C or a CIDFontType0C subtype    To look specifically at PDF object no  15  which holds the font  ArialMT   one can use the -o 15 parameter  pdf-parser py -o 15 big1 pdf   obj 15 0   Type     Referencing     Contains stream     lt  lt        Length1 778552       Length 1581435       Filter  ASCIIHexDecode     gt  gt   This pdf-parser py output tells us that this object contains a stream  which it will not directly display  that has a length of 1 581 435 Bytes and is encoded       quot compressed quot   with ASCIIHexEncode and needs to be decoded       quot de-compressed quot  or  quot filtered quot   with the help of the standard  ASCIIHexDecode filter  To dump any stream from an object  pdf-parser py can be called with the -d dumpname parameter  Let s do it  pdf-parser py -o 15 -d dumped-data ext big1 pdf  Our extracted data dump will be in the file named dumped-data ext  Let s see how big it is  ls -l dumped-data ext   -rw-r--r--  1 kurtpfeifle  staff  1581435 Apr 11 00 29 dumped-data ext  Oh look  it is 1 581 435 Bytes  We saw this figure in the previous command s output  Opening this file with a text editor confirms that its content is ASCII hex encoded data  Opening the file with a font reading tool like otfinfo  this is a part of the lcdf-typetools package  will lead to some disappointment at first  otfinfo -i dumped-data ext   otfinfo  dumped-data ext  not an OpenType font  bad magic number   OK  this is because we did not  yet  let pdf-parser py make use of its full magic  to dump a filtered  decoded stream  For this we have to add the -f parameter  pdf-parser py -o 15 -f -d dumped-data-decoded ext big1 pdf  What s the size is this new file  ls -l dumped-data-decoded ext   -rw-r--r--  1 kurtpfeifle  staff  778552 Apr 11 00 39 dumped-data-decoded ext  Oh  look  that exact number was also already stored in the PDF object no  15 dictionary as the value for key  Length1    What does file think it is  file dumped-data-decoded ext   dumped-data-decoded ext  TrueType font data  What does otfinfo tell us about it  otfinfo -i dumped-data-decoded ext   Family               Arial   Subfamily            Regular   Full name            Arial   PostScript name      ArialMT   Version              Version 5 10   Unique ID            Monotype Arial Regular Version 5 10  Microsoft    Designer             Monotype Type Drawing Office - Robin Nicholas  Patricia Saunders 1982   Manufacturer         The Monotype Corporation   Trademark            Arial is a trademark of The Monotype Corporation    Copyright               2011 The Monotype Corporation  All Rights Reserved    License Description  You may use this font to display and print content as permitted by                        the license terms for the product in which this font is included                         You may only  i  embed this font in content as permitted by the                         embedding restrictions included in this font  and  ii  temporarily                         download this font to a printer or other output device to help                        print content    Vendor ID            TMC  So Bingo   we have a winner  pdf-parser py did indeed extract a valid font file for us  Given the size of this file  778 552 Bytes   it looks like this font had been embedded even completely in the PDF    We could rename it to arial-regular ttf and install it as such and happily make use of it   Caveats   In any case you need to follow the license that applies to the font  Some font licences do not allow free use and or distribution  Pirating fonts is like pirating any software or other copyrighted material   Most PDFs which are in the wild out there do not embed the full font anyway  but only subsets  Extracting a subset of a font is only useful in a very limited scope  if at all    Please do also read the following about Pros and  more  Cons regarding font extraction efforts   http   typophile com node 34377     not available anymore  but can bee seen on Wayback Machine at https   web archive org web 20110717120241 typophile com node 34377

User · Answer

http   www verypdf com app pdf-font-extractor pdf-font-extracting-tool html IMO easiest way to extract fonts  Windows

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This is a followup to the font-forge section of  Kurt Pfeifle s answer  specific to Red Hat  and possibly other Linux distros     After opening the PDF and selecting the font you want  you will want to select  File -  Generate Fonts     option  If there are errors in the file  you can choose to ignore them or save the file and edit them  Most of the errors can be fixed automatically if you click  Fix  enough times  Click  Element -  Font Info      and  Fontname    Family Name  and  Name for Humans  are all set to values you like  If not  modify them and save the file somewhere  These names will determine how your font appears on the system  Select your file name and click  Save       Once you have your TTF file  you can install it on your system by   Copying it to folder  usr share fonts  as root  Running fc-cache -f  usr share fonts   as root

User · Answer

Eventually found the FontForge Windows installer package and opened the PDF through the installed program  Worked a treat  so happy

[pdf] How can I extract embedded fonts from a PDF as valid font files?

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