One (rather tedious, error-prone and difficult difficult) method would be to convert the PDF to PostScript, open the .ps file in an editor, remove the font (s), save the file and re-convert the .ps to a PDF again (using an Ghostscript commandline). Or directly from .ps to the PNG you want without the detour via PDF If you want to try if Ghostscript is able to also 'un-embed' the fonts used (sometimes it works, sometimes not -- depending on the complexity of the embedded font, and also on the font type used), you can try to add the following to your gs command: Note that Ghostscript may do font substitution, so the font embedded may differ from that specified in the original file. Some other options which can be useful (see your Ghostscript documentation) are -dMaxSubsetPct=100 , -dSubsetFonts=true and -dEmbedAllFonts=true . Value The shell command used to invoke Ghostscript is returned invisibly. Defines whether pdfwrite will compress embedded fonts in the output. The default value is true; the false setting is intended only for debugging as it will result in larger output. -dCompressStreams= boolean Defines whether pdfwrite will compress streams other than those in fonts or pages in the output. Embedding Computer Modern Fonts. PDF Creation and Manipulation Basic Usage Convert PostScript to PDF: gs -q -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=fileout.pdf filein.ps Merge/combine PDF and/or PostScript files: gs -q -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=fileout.pdf filein.ps filein2.pdf Ghostscript is an interpreter for the PostScript® language and PDF files. It is available under either the GNU GPL Affero license or licensed for commercial use from Artifex Software, Inc. It has been under active development for over 30 years and has been ported to several different systems during this time. Im using ghostscript under Windows 7. The main goal of the script i use is to re-do a PDF from an original PDF (with several options) : client requirements. Cannot extract the embedded font 'MYEWJG+ArialMT'. Some characters may not display or print correctly. As i understand, a font is not well embedded during the transformation. Acrobat 6 enables you to remove embedded fonts from your PDF using its PDF Optimizer feature. Select Advanced PDF Optimizer . . . Fonts to select fonts for removal. 4.13.5 Configure Ghostscript Font Embedding. Ghostscript must embed all fonts except the Base 14 fonts. You can embed these, too, if you choose. Let's start with a PDF called "input.pdf" that contains a full page of text and an embedded font subset: We can use Adobe Acrobat DC to delete all of the text on the page except for the first two words "Tell me" and save the document as "edited.pdf." (This is also the reason why Ghostscript in many cases is able to --within limits-- "repair" b0rken PDF files, or to embed fonts into the output PDFs which are not embedded in input PDFs, or to remove duplicate images, replacing them by mere references, etc. -- and overall created smaller, better optimized files from bloated input PDFs You should be able to do this using setdistillerparams which is documented in Adobe tech note 5151. Send the setdistillerparms code before processing your file. Here is a complex example that includes commands to embed fonts: /ASCII85EncodePages false /AutoPositionEPSFiles true /AutoRotatePages /None /Binding /Left /CalGrayProfile ()