How do I find out what fonts are used in a document/picture?

Question

Is it possible to identify the font used in a specific document/picture?

Answers to this question should identify:

• Possible methods to do this (perhaps one answer per method) and adequately describe how to use it (as opposed to merely stating it);
• Ways of finding the identified fonts, if possible (free or not); and
• Any prerequisites associated with the method used, if required (for example, "In order to use method X, your document has to be in format Y").

_{This question is meant as an FAQ, based on an original inquiry launched on meta. Its aim is to facilitate the community with the general procedures involved in font identification. Similar cases are solved on a per-usage basis on Graphic Design's {font-identification} tag.}

Answer 1

For PDFs, I know of two ways you can find out the fonts of a file.

If you have Adobe Acrobat/Reader, you can find out the fonts used in the file by looking at the Fonts tab in the document's properties (CTRL+D or File->Properties->Fonts). There you will see a list of all the fonts used in the document. It can take several seconds to compile the entire list if a document uses many fonts. If you're using Evince as your PDF-viewer you can find the same function under the properties menu there as well.

You can use the tool pdffonts. This is included as part of xpdf, which is available in pre-compiled binaries for both Linux and Windows. The program's website says that people have reported being able to compile it on OS X and other systems.

To find out which fonts are used on a specific page, e.g. page 10, pdffonts offers the following command

pdffonts.exe -f 10 -l 10 "c:\file\path\myfile.pdf"

which can be put in loop to show the fonts page by page (here for Windows until page 100):

for /l %i in (1,1,100) do (echo.PAGE %i & "pdffonts.exe" -f %i -l %i "c:\file\path\myfile.pdf")

Answer 2

There is a dedicated »Type ID« sub-forum on typophile.com. About one to two dozen type id questions are asked and answered there every day. Whenever WhatTheFont doesn't help, this is probably the best place to go.

As a third solution, midway between consulting an expert and consulting an automat, Identifont offers a semi-automated method which can be fun to use, and pretty instructive too, as you practice how to look at a typeface.

Answer 3

I want to state first that I'm affiliated with the solution I present as I'm the chief software engineer behind it, but if you check the solution yourself, I think you 'll be convinced I have my reasons to be proud about it.

We have created "Find my Font" a software application that runs on a Windows or Mac PC and identifies the fonts of a given bitmap image. It searches both our online font database (70.000+ fonts) and the fonts on your computer and compares them against the letters you select on your digital image. You are provided with a list of matching (and similar) fonts along with the matching accuracy for each one. You may also type text and see how well the matching went (font preview). The main features of the software are:

1. Great matching accuracy even on small and low quality images of just 10 or 20 pixels high

2. Super fast: Online speed: About 10 secs for 70.000+ fonts. Local Speed on average PC: About 5 millions fonts / min

3. The online database provides previews and buy or download links for both commercial fonts (Myfonts, Fontshop, ...) & free fonts (Dafont, Google Web Fonts)

4. You can browse your local fonts and find similar ones

5. You can capture & use any color image as input without special pre-processing: The application provides all required tools (if required) for restoring perspective, size, contrast and isolate any connected or script letters.

6. Local fonts supported: You can use any True Type (TTF) / Open Type (OTF) or older Type-1 Postsrcipt fonts you may have on your computer.

You can find more information or download a 30 days trial at: http://www.findmyfont.com/index.php/find-my-font/features

Regards

Fivos Vilanakis

Chief Technical Officer Softonium Developments

PS: "Find my Font" is far more accurate than WhatTheFont or WhatFontIs services as it works with smaller images and automatically recognizes artificially bold or slanted fonts.

Answer 4

I love Identifont. It asks you questions about the characteristics of the font and gives you the best match from its constantly growing database.

Answer 5

FontSquirrel now offers something it's calling the Font Matcherator which analyses and matches the font in an image.

In my fairly cursory tests, it does a pretty decent job. At least it's another tool to add to the list of possibilities.

Answer 6

If the document happens to be a journal article available from arXiv, there is a good chance that the .tex sources are available as well and they will tell you which font packages were used.

Let's take the article from this recent question Which is the LaTeX font used by Google's DeepMind in this paper?:

From it's arXiv page https://arxiv.org/abs/2207.09238 you can click on Other Formats in the right sidebar

This will bring you to the page https://arxiv.org/format/2207.09238 from where you can download the source.

After decompressing the .tar.gz file (depending on your operating system you might have to add this file extension first), you'll have a folder with the LaTeX sources. For the article in this example, you can find the relevant packages in the .cls file:

\RequirePackage{XCharter}
\RequirePackage[xcharter,bigdelims,vvarbb]{newtxmath}
\RequirePackage[scaled=1.1]{zlmtt}

Answer 7

Another tool that can be used for this is masterpdfeditor.

This way you can click precisely on the text on the page and it will tell you the font.

Unlike Adobe's tools, this one is (mostly) free.

The demo version allows you to try out all the features of Master PDF Editor. There are no limitations, except for the addition of a watermark on the output file.

(source)

As mentioned in the answer below, inkscape is also free and can do this.

Although if you import the PDF into inkscape it will not display the font correctly if the font is not installed in your system.

Of course, after getting the font name if you're using e.g. pdflatex to compile you'd need to decrypt what the "CMR10" mean. For that refer to Berry naming scheme list of LaTeX font families. (I'm not really aware of a better method)

I'm also not sure what the random 6 characters before the + is for ("XESXVG") other than that it's not a part of the font name.

Answer 8

Originally, I posted this answer below another question, but was asked to add it here also.

One easy way to inspect a pdf and the used fonts is opening it in Inkscape, then mark the text in question with the text tool. Even if you don't have the font, Inkscape tells you, which font it would like to have, giving you at least the name.

Beside this, I recommend using Inkscape anyway, as it is very helpful for creating small diagrams (if you don't want to use tikz).