Identifying styles in PDF

Question

It happens many times that I take a look at an interestingly typeset document in LaTeX, but to which I don't have the source-code to inspect the style. One such example is this one: http://philosophy.unimelb.edu.au/ajl/2011/2011_5.pdf

I know there are free services online that identify the fonts. They may be useful for simple text, but, for example, mathematics, it becomes very hard to identify the correct style.

So, my question is, what could one use to help reproducing a specific style when only having access to the final PDF?

Answer 1

For fonts, you can use pdffonts:

$ pdffonts charismanie.pdf 
name                                 type              emb sub uni object ID
------------------------------------ ----------------- --- --- --- ---------
BQFNPY+TimesNewRomanPS-ItalicMT      CID TrueType      yes yes yes     59  0
UQUJMH+Centennial-Roman              CID TrueType      yes yes yes     60  0
NSOUSR+LinLibertine                  Type 1            yes yes no     137  0
NSOUSR+LinLibertine                  Type 1            yes yes no     138  0
PTKESR+LinLibertineI                 Type 1            yes yes no     143  0
TYFIDZ+CMSY10                        Type 1            yes yes no     144  0
MHUAJQ+LinLibertineB                 Type 1            yes yes no     145  0
[none]                               Type 3            yes no  no     146  0
QTAYVE+LinBiolinumB                  Type 1            yes yes no     161  0
CXJGOW+CMR12                         Type 1            yes yes no     207  0
PTKESR+LinLibertineI                 Type 1            yes yes no     285  0
PFIFSH+fourier-orns                  Type 1            yes yes no     465  0

Edit: pipitas provided a nice answer with the -f and -l options for pdffonts. In order to automate his suggestion a bit more to list fonts in a PDF, here is a little script:

#!/bin/bash

# Parse options
RANGE=0
while getopts ":ap:f:l:g:" option; do
   case $option in
      a)
         RANGE=1
         ;;
      p)
         RANGE=1
         STARTPAGE=$OPTARG
         ENDPAGE=$STARTPAGE
         ;;
      f)
         RANGE=1
         STARTPAGE=$OPTARG
         ;;
      l)
         RANGE=1
         ENDPAGE=$OPTARG
         ;;
      g)
         GREP=1
         KEYWORD=$OPTARG
         ;;
      *)
         echo "Unknown option $option"
         exit 1
         ;;
  esac
done

shift $(($OPTIND - 1))
PDF="$1"

if [ -z "$PDF" ]; then
   echo "E: You must provide a PDF file"
   exit 1
fi

PAGES=$(pdfinfo $PDF | awk '/^Pages:/ { print $2 }')


if [ $RANGE = 1 ]; then
   for p in $(seq ${STARTPAGE:-1} ${ENDPAGE:-$PAGES}); do
      echo "== Fonts on page $p/$PAGES =="
      pdffonts -f $p -l $p $PDF
   done
elif [ $GREP = 1 ]; then
   FOUND=""
   for p in $(seq ${STARTPAGE:-1} ${ENDPAGE:-$PAGES}); do
      pdffonts -f $p -l $p $PDF | grep -q "^${KEYWORD} " && \
         FOUND="$FOUND $p"
   done
   if [[ -n $FOUND ]]; then
      echo "The font $KEYWORD was found on the following pages:$FOUND"
   else
      echo "The font $KEYWORD was not found"
   fi
else
   pdffonts $PDF
fi

It is a bash script, to be used on *nix systems. Here, I saved it as showfonts.sh).

Here is what it does:

• Without any options, it just executes pdffonts on the given PDF file;

• The -a option (for all) does what pipitas suggested: it lists fonts on every page individually, e.g.:

  $ ./showfonts.sh -a charismanie.pdf
  

• The -p option (for page) lists fonts on a specific page of the PDF, e.g.:

  $ ./showfonts.sh -p 15 charismanie.pdf
  

• The -f and -l options (for first and last) are the equivalent of the same options in pdffonts (so -f 1 is equivalent to -a), e.g.:

  $ ./showfonts.sh -f 13 -l 16 charismanie.pdf
  

• The -g option (for grep) lets you find on which pages a font is used, e.g.:

  $ ./showfonts.sh -g "LeagueGothic" charismanie.pdf
  

  It also also takes wildcards to match fonts with similar names, e.g.:

  $ ./showfonts.sh -g ".*Libertine.*" charismanie.pdf
  

This script is now committed on github: https://github.com/raphink/listpdffonts

Edit: The script now supports font subsets with -g as requested by Kurt Pfeifle. See Git repository.

Answer 2

For the fonts. If viewing in Adobe Reader, right click, Document Properties..., then Fonts.

Answer 3

@Mark:

If you want to know the fonts on page 3, use

pdffonts -f 3 -l 3 /path/to/pdf

(The f is for first, the l is for last page). If you want to know which font appears on which page of a 10-page PDF, use

for p in $(seq 1 10); do
    pdffonts -f ${p} -l ${p} /path/to/pdf
done

Above examples are for *nix OS. If you are on Windows, try

for %p in (1,1,10) do pdffonts -f %p -l %p

Answer 4

It seems to be a in-house style for "The Australasian Journal of Logic". They require submissions as standard LaTeX documents using the article class, and the style file is not publicly available.