PDF Font Checker

Why does a missing font change how a PDF looks?

Lists every font a PDF's pages actually use and says whether it is embedded, travelling with the document, or borrowed from whatever machine opens it. A borrowed font is the most common reason an issued drawing prints wrong, and it is invisible until somebody else opens the file.

A PDF can either carry a font inside itself or simply name it and leave the reader to find one. If the reader has no match it substitutes a different face, and because the substitute has different letter widths the text reflows: it overlaps, spills out of the title block, or pushes a dimension off its leader. The check is exact rather than a judgement, because a font either carries a font program or it does not. Two categories are deliberately kept apart from a plain failure. The fourteen standard faces — Helvetica, Courier, Times, Symbol and Zapf Dingbats in their variants — are supplied by conforming PDF readers, so naming one without embedding it renders correctly, although PDF/A and PDF 2.0 still expect fonts to be embedded. Arial is not among them, however common it is; it is a different face that viewers substitute by convention, so a drawing that names Arial without embedding it is a genuine risk even though it usually looks close. The tool also reports only fonts that some text actually selects. A left-over entry in a page's resource list is not evidence that anything uses it, and reporting those as faults would bury the real ones. Checking fonts before a set goes out for review, in Xenmark or anywhere else, means reviewers comment on the drawing rather than on text that moved.