What font `2600` mag use ?

Problem

2600 magazine (https://www.2600.com/) been around for few decades, however I've just recently realized that pages and pages of small text (printed edition is about B5 format?) are pleasure to read. Maybe it's because of high quality of materials from interesting people or maybe it's... font. Quick search in generative language models suggest some sort of TimesNewRoman but not exact match. Opening recent issue PDF in Adobe Acrobat Reader lists a hefty amount of fonts that you would need to go one by one and eyeball for a match. So question is what font for given text in PDF is used? There is another way...

Solution

Writing a python script that uses PyMuPDF https://pymupdf.readthedocs.io/en/latest/ quickly gives you which font is used on exactly what piece of text on page of your choice:

import fitz  # PyMuPDF

doc = fitz.open("C:\\c\\2600.pdf")
page = doc[0]  # page 1 (0-based)

text_dict = page.get_text("dict")

for block in text_dict["blocks"]:
    for line in block.get("lines", []):
        for span in line.get("spans", []):
            print(repr(span["text"]), "->", span["font"], span["size"])

Gives you nice view what font is used and where

Answer

2600 magazine uses TimesLTPro size of 8.6pt for their articles. That's it, roll credits.

but...

TimesLTPro-Roman is the PostScript font name of the Roman style in the Times LT Pro family. Vendors and "foundries" (I imagine it's common in some communities to call "foundry" some place font originates) show such font as “Times LT Pro Roman”. Also there's a lot of variations of Times New Roman across operating systems and embedded fonts that are being sold on the market. Lets dive deeper.

PDF File produced by 2600 have quite few fonts embedded. Not sure if all of those are used however I'm focusing only on one we read mostly in the magazine, as previously identified TimesLTPro-Roman

It's object number 619 embedded in the pdf file, however typical attempt on extracting all items from the pdf, does not produce *619 file.

mutool extract 2600.pdf

results in missing id:619 object extraction

To our advantage comes previously used python library: PyMuPDF
After intalling it with pip it also exposes set of oneliner tools that can be used to extract pdf fonts as well

pymupdf extract -fonts 2600.pdf

extracting all 67 fonts (and preserving their names)

CFF

CFF is not natively supported under Microsoft Windows. Compact Font Format and TTF (TrueType) are both outline font formats, but they’re built differently: TTF uses quadratic Bézier curves with TrueType hinting, while CFF is a compact PostScript-based format (often seen inside OpenType-CFF fonts) using cubic Bézier curves. TTF became dominant on Windows and the web, but CFF is still in use because produces smaller file sizes, integrates very well with PostScript/PDF workflows, and has long-standing support in professional publishing and print environments—so a lot of high-end text and type foundry workflows still rely on CFF-based fonts.

To open CFF under windows (or other systems) you can use FontForge https://fontforge.org/en-US/

Thanks to it we can now preview the file and see it's details

Conclusion

In this article I've shown how to establish what fonts are used in PDF file and their copyright owners.

From what it seems, this nice looking font, is a professionally licensed and bought product, from another corporation and used since 2014 at least. From legal perspective it's use anywhere outside of agreed terms would be violation, so anyone considering using it for their own benefit would need probably go one and only "the-bay-way".