Drawing glyphs based on their index (NOT their character code)

[Christian Stapfer]

"Christian Stapfer" <nobody at nowhere.nil> schrieb im Newsbeitrag 
news:b7256$4bf516e1$544ba447$20752 at news.hispeed.ch...
> Here's an interesting little problem: I am given a master.ttf font file 
> and a subset file subset.ttf of that font, and I am asked to map indices 
> of all the glyphs in subset.ttf to the corresponding indices in 
> master.ttf. The subset font file is the result of a pipeline of 3 tools 
> (pdflatex, Adobe Reader, and the Microsoft XPS Document Writer).

<snip/>

> So my next best idea is to draw the various glyphs as, 16x16 B/W images, 
> say, and use the 16*16 bits (that is, 16 ints or 8 longs) that result from 
> this as a sufficiently precise description of the glyph to do the 
> necessary comparisons.
>
> PIL would be great for this, except for one "little" problem: I need to be 
> able to draw glyphs based on their index, not based on their character 
> code.
>
> Any ideas to get around that limitation of PIL's drawing primitives?

To answer my own question: I might parse the cmap table of the ttf file, and 
then invert that mapping char->index. I think that's going to be the next 
approach that I will try.

Regards,
Christian