tl;dr
Other than the human eyeball, I know of no tool that can inspect a PDF and infer that the program used to produce the PDF has substituted a font.
You could just assume that if Courier font is present in the PDF, something went wrong. A rough and ready check would be
strings filename.pdf | grep Courier
In general, to prevent this sort of problem, I would
0) Make sure any source EPS objects had all fonts embedded.
This is important if the Mac used for the Quark project lacks any of those fonts.
I usually create outlines on my EPS files before I load in Quark but forgot this time.
Converting characters to outlines (i.e. to curves and control-point data) is another way of removing any requirement for the consumer/recipient of the EPS to itself have the used fonts already installed.
1) Make Quark embed fonts
Font Settings
When you export a layout in PDF format, you can choose to reference or embed (download) the fonts used in that layout.
...
- Embedding means that the fonts themselves are included in the PDF file. This increases the size of the PDF file, but ensures that the file will display or output correctly.
2) View the list of fonts in Acrobat
and double check that it shows them all as being embedded (Menu: File -> Properties, Fonts tab)
I'd worry about the 5th font in this list.
Update:
Jayme's zip file shows a Quark dialog box that says
"Some EPS/PDF pictures in this document use screen fonts not available
in your system, including Univers-Condensed and Univers-CondensedBold"
It is clear from the final PDF image that Quark has substituted Courier for the missing fonts but has applied the letter-positioning from the EPS that would have been appropriate for Univers-Condensed.
One solution is to purchase and install Univers-Condensed and Univers-CondensedBold on the Mac where the Quark project is being output to PDF.
Another solution would be to go back to the application that produced the EPS that has been placed in this project and reproduce that EPS but force it to embed font (used subsets) into the EPS, then reimport that EPS into the final project before producing the final print-ready PDF.
Best Answer
By default,
pdftotextoutputs unicode (UTF-8) data. If your terminal or text editor doesn't support UTF-8, ligatures such as "fi" and "fl" (which can be represented as a single character in unicode) will appear strangely, as you have noticed.The simple fix is to tell
pdftotextto output ASCII instead of unicode:This should produce clean ASCII output, removing your need to clean it up manually afterwards.