Getting TrueType font "post" table from font name

Question

I am trying to extract the "post" table from an installed TrueType font, which I know only by name. How can I achieve this?

I have seen the GetFontData function, which seems to do almost exactly what I want, except that it gets the font data from the device context's currently loaded font. In my case though I do not have a device context, only the font name.
Additionally I have seen similar queries such as this, for looking up and retrieving the entire font file, but this seems unnecessarily inefficient and long-winded, given that Windows can already load and parse the font data (as we see for GetFontData). Furthermore I don't need the whole file, just the "post" table. Is there really no way except implementing it all myself?

Answer 1

You can call GetFontData(...) without having a window or GUI, e.g. from a command line program, by just making a dummy device context on the fly and selecting a font into it

#include <Windows.h>
#include <vector>

std::vector<unsigned char> GetFontDataByName(const wchar_t* font_name)
{
    HDC hdc = CreateCompatibleDC(NULL);

    auto font = CreateFont(0, 0, 0, 0,
        FW_NORMAL, FALSE, FALSE, FALSE,
        ANSI_CHARSET, OUT_DEFAULT_PRECIS,
        CLIP_DEFAULT_PRECIS, DEFAULT_QUALITY,
        DEFAULT_PITCH,
        font_name);
    SelectObject(hdc, font);
    auto num_bytes = GetFontData(hdc, 0, 0, NULL, 0);
    std::vector<unsigned char> font_data(num_bytes);
    auto result = GetFontData(hdc, 0, 0, &(font_data[0]), num_bytes);

    DeleteDC(hdc);

    return font_data;
}

int main()
{
    auto font_data = GetFontDataByName(L"Times New Roman");

    return 0;
}