I'm writing code for a some lasercutter software ( https://github.com/meerk40t/meerk40t ) and I want to lasercut the contours of the glyphs in the font. Now wxPython has a bunch of nice font stuff already built in, so you can list the fonts in an OS independent way, but these actually refer to the wx.Font object and I don't see an easy way to access the contours through that.
If I got the file, I could run something like freetype or fonttools and use that to get the contours, but I would still want OS independent font accessing, I don't see an easy way to process that. There are some weird things like sending writing this into an SVG and sending it through Inkscape commandline to convert text to paths. I would prefer fewer rather than more dependencies, but I would also prefer it working to the bupkis I currently have.
wxPython currently lets me get system fonts and put them out to the graphics contexts so there should be a way in there. But, I see no way forward. I could access the ttf files directly but without the font stuff done for me, I don't know what the current selected font file would be, and I would need to add a dependency for font contour reading or code up my own.
There is nothing in wxWidgets API that would give you the font glyphs data itself directly. You will need to do it in using platform-specific APIs, which is not going to be simple or pleasant, but should be doable as you can get whatever these APIs take on input from a wxNativeFontInfo object that you can obtain from wxFont (e.g. under MSW the native font info contains LOGFONT, under GTK -- PangoFontDescription etc).