[metapost] extract names of glyphs in font?

[Daniel Luecking]

----- Original Message -----
From: Steve White <stevan.white at googlemail.com>
Date: Saturday, February 28, 2009 12:20 pm
Subject: [metapost] extract names of glyphs in font?
To: metapost at tug.org

> Hi,
> 
> I'm extracting glyphs from a font (Yannis Haralambous' Sinhala) using
> commands such as
>      mpost '&./mfplain \mag=83.82; mode:=localfont; filenametemplate
> "%j-%4c.eps"; input sinha12.mf'
> This works pretty well, but I want more:
> I can see the names of the glyphs in the .mf files:  the code for the
> glyph named "aa" starts with
>    xbeginchar(oct"020",12.8FX#,18.9FY#,6.3FY#); "aa";
...
> Is there any way in MetaPost to represent that string in the EPS file?
> (It could be either within the file or in the file name.)

In metaFONT, a bare string expression is a "title" and would appear on the 
terminal if tracingtitles>0. It would also be in the tfm file if proofing > 0. 
I don't know exactly what is done with titles in metaPOST, as they are only 
briefly mentioned under tracingtitles. I'm guessing MP does nothing with 
them except display them on screen when tracingtitles > 0.

Your only hope would seem to be to search for them and incorporate them
into a command that does what you want, such as write a special to the 
output file.
 

Dan