How can one determine where in a document a font is used?

You can do this with Acrobat Professional, but it's a little bit obscure. Here's the recipe for Acrobat 9:

  1. Advanced->Preflight...
  2. Select the Profiles tab, and the left of the three buttons (with the tooltip Select profiles, and an icon that's maybe supposed to be a basket?)
  3. This step is optional, but if you do it then you can choose the fonts from a list instead of having to type them:
    • Select any one of the profiles (I like Report PDF syntax issues) and execute it by pressing the Analyze button.
    • Assuming there were no errors, go back to the profile tab
  4. From the Options button/menu in the top right of the window, select Create New Preflight Profile...
  5. Give the profile a name (eg "Check usage of specific fonts").
  6. In the tree panel on the left, on the Fonts branch of your new profile.
  7. Use the dropdown next to A font is used which is to change it to Info.
  8. Click on the Add... button and choose the font(s) you wish to investigate (if you skipped the optional step above, then you have to simply type the font name, ignoring the 6-character random prefix).
  9. Click OK, select your new profile (under Custom profiles) and press Analyze
  10. Expand the Text uses font tree branch, to see all the uses. Choose the different uses of your font(s) and either double click to jump to the location in the document (with a box around it for emphasis), or click Show in snap to see a preview of only the text in question.

Another useful tool for investigating the usage of fonts in PDFs is also available from the Acrobat 9 preflight tool. Click on the Options button/menu and choose Create inventory.... Check only Fonts and click OK. Now you have a document showing the use of all the fonts, including which glyphs are included in the subset, what are their Unicode names, which pages they appear on, as well as other arcana such as the PostScript name and the italic angle.


I would at first look when t1cmtt.fd is loaded. This should give you some indication when the font is used the first time.

You could also manipulate the map-line. With a bit chance you can see where the font is used, or you get at least informations in the log about the glyph names used.

 \documentclass{scrartcl}

 \usepackage[ansinew]{inputenc}
 \usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
 \pdfmapline{=ectt1095 SFTT1095 <SkakNew-Figurine.pfb}

 \begin{document}
 abc {\ttfamily abc KQR}

 \end{document}

I usually open the PDF in FontForge, select the font in question and see what subset of glyphs are used and then search for them in the PDF. Might not be the best method, but I used it a lot while testing unicode-math package to see what symbols were still taken from CM and not from my fonts.

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