Approaches for enabling a computerized entity to recognize characters in an electronic document. In a persistent data store, character identification data is stored. Character identification data is data that, for one or more characters of one or more fonts, associates (a) glyph data for a character with (b) code point data for the character, where the glyph data describes how to render the character on or to an output device, and the code point data identifies, to the computerized entity, the identity of the character. Upon determining that an embedded font document, such as a PDF document, does not include a set of code point data for a particular character, the character identification data is consulted to determine the identity of the particular character. In this way, a machine can recognize characters in the embedded font document and perform functions such as indexing or searching on the embedded font document.