> Fonts in PDF’s are insane because they’re often subset so they only include the required glyphs and the characters are remapped back to 1, 2, 3 etc instead of usual ascii codes.

I've actually seen obfuscation used in a PDF where they load in a custom font that changes the character mapping, so the text you get out of the PDF is gibberish, but the fonts displayed on rendering are correct (a simple character substitution cipher).

The important thing to remember whenever you think something should be simple, is that someone somewhere has a business need for it to be more complicated, so you'll likely have to deal with that complication at some point.