Cid Font F1 F2 F3 F4 Better | Bonus Inside |

From here, you can extract the raw CIDs and remap them using a known Unicode table, producing a better output than relying on the broken original. Scenario: A government agency had 10,000 PDFs created in 2005. Each file used F1 (Korean), F2 (Chinese), F3 (Japanese) interchangeably. Text extraction was impossible.

pdffonts yourfile.pdf Look for the "Type" column: CIDFontType0 or CIDFontType2 . Then inspect the "CMAP" column. If you see Identity-H but the language is Japanese, no direct conversion is possible without a custom CMAP. cid font f1 f2 f3 f4 better

/F1 /CIDFontType0

If you have ever dug into the inner workings of a PDF file—especially one containing complex scripts like Chinese, Japanese, or Korean (CJK)—you have likely stumbled upon cryptic labels: CID Font F1, F2, F3, and F4 . These identifiers are not random. They are placeholders for a sophisticated font mapping system. But the critical question every developer, publisher, and archivist asks is: What makes a CID font F1, F2, F3, F4 better than the default? From here, you can extract the raw CIDs