I'm sure that hartmut has done a presentation sometimes ago f, could be
http://www.matexhu.org/eurotex2006/lectures/pdftex/hartmut-talk.pdf
 


pypdf is a python module at lowlevel.
http://pybrary.net/pyPdf/

This looks very interesting!



As exercise, you can try to minimic pdffonts in python with pypdf
(pdfs with ttf,otf,type1 etc )

I'm afraid, I don't understand :-(

Under linux, xpdf comes with pdffonts, a cmd line tools that extracts fonts information from a pdf.
You can try to mimic it with pyPdf, so your knowledge  can augment .



--
luigi