#6 accessing font information

[Anonymous]

Font designers seem to almost randomly use the name blocks for fonts, makes it really difficult to determine what the "Mac font name" will be (which is what Xpress displays I think, Adobe keeps a table of their own names for most fonts because the mess is so bad). Here's an example output from a reputable font house:

%: ./fontnames.ff AntennaTT/ANTECBL_.ttf
Copyright (c) 2000-2006 by George Williams.
Executable based on sources from 17:29 9-Feb-2006.
Warning: Mac string is a subset of the Unicode string in the 'name' table
for the Family string in the English (US) language.
Warning: Mac and Windows entries in the 'name' table differ for the
Styles (SubFamily) string in the language English (US)
Mac String: Black
Windows String: Regular
filename: ANTECBL_.ttf
postscript name: AntennaExtraCond-Black
postscript family name: AntennaExtraCond-Black
postscript full name: AntennaExtraCond-Black
FOND Mac group name:
CID top-level name:
CID family name:
CID full name:

Note the Mac name is just "Black"! (Nobody seems to do much better, even Adobe's PostScript fonts are inconsistent.) TextEdit actually does actually get the font name. I know this isn't your fault, but is there anything to do about it?

I need to get general font information: It's name as it would appear on a Mac or Quark Xpress, it's Mac font weights (there's a block of info I think fontforge works with it but I can't find it from the scripting interface), and it's glyph coverage -- which I think/hope is accessable from the unicode blocks the characters sit in ... as well as a drawing of each non-empty glyph.

I'm having trouble getting anywhere, even with the font names. What a mess!