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You misunderstood the meaning. The PDF contains a font table. When an OCR application supplies text without a Postscript type of designation for a font, the PDF software generates fonts for the text in accordance to the Postscript like instructions provided by the OCR software. Adobe Acrobat uses the Adobe Multiple Masters fonts to generate the font table for the PDF file. The absence of a fonts table in the PDF file tends to signify the Postscript like instructions for constructing such a font table were not received from the source scan. Since OCR software always creates a text layer, it appears the absence of fonts in the PDF font table indicates there was no OCR text layer and no OCR software to produce the extended ASCII, Unicode, and/or Postscript like instructions for the PDF fonts table.

Thanks for the further explanation. It is news to me that the OCR part of a scan-to-PDF process generates a font specification, even a Multiple Masters one. I don’t completely understand why, since as I understand it the text layer will never be printed—I would have thought it would be simpler and more compact to just use the ASCII designations. But maybe it’s more compact or efficient to specify the characters as part of a font, I dunno.

It does, however, seem plausible to me that the font info got stripped out when the file was opened in Preview. It’s clear the PDF that was posted was generated from Preview, for whatever reason—the fact that there’s no font info in that file when opened in Acrobat doesn’t prove there was no font info in whatever file was opened in Preview.