Font table

Matplotlib's font support is provided by the FreeType library.

Here, we use table to draw a table that shows the glyphs by Unicode codepoint. For brevity, the table only contains the first 256 glyphs.

The example is a full working script. You can download it and use it to investigate a font by running

python font_table.py /path/to/font/file

import os
from pathlib import Path
import unicodedata

import matplotlib.font_manager as fm
from matplotlib.ft2font import FT2Font
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt


def print_glyphs(path):
    """
    Print the all glyphs in the given font file to stdout.

    Parameters
    ----------
    path : str or None
        The path to the font file.  If None, use Matplotlib's default font.
    """
    if path is None:
        path = fm.findfont(fm.FontProperties())  # The default font.

    font = FT2Font(path)

    charmap = font.get_charmap()
    max_indices_len = len(str(max(charmap.values())))

    print("The font face contains the following glyphs:")
    for char_code, glyph_index in charmap.items():
        char = chr(char_code)
        name = unicodedata.name(
                char,
                f"{char_code:#x} ({font.get_glyph_name(glyph_index)})")
        print(f"{glyph_index:>{max_indices_len}} {char} {name}")


def draw_font_table(path):
    """
    Draw a font table of the first 255 chars of the given font.

    Parameters
    ----------
    path : str or None
        The path to the font file.  If None, use Matplotlib's default font.
    """
    if path is None:
        path = fm.findfont(fm.FontProperties())  # The default font.

    font = FT2Font(path)
    # A charmap is a mapping of "character codes" (in the sense of a character
    # encoding, e.g. latin-1) to glyph indices (i.e. the internal storage table
    # of the font face).
    # In FreeType>=2.1, a Unicode charmap (i.e. mapping Unicode codepoints)
    # is selected by default.  Moreover, recent versions of FreeType will
    # automatically synthesize such a charmap if the font does not include one
    # (this behavior depends on the font format; for example it is present
    # since FreeType 2.0 for Type 1 fonts but only since FreeType 2.8 for
    # TrueType (actually, SFNT) fonts).
    # The code below (specifically, the ``chr(char_code)`` call) assumes that
    # we have indeed selected a Unicode charmap.
    codes = font.get_charmap().items()

    labelc = ["{:X}".format(i) for i in range(16)]
    labelr = ["{:02X}".format(16 * i) for i in range(16)]
    chars = [["" for c in range(16)] for r in range(16)]

    for char_code, glyph_index in codes:
        if char_code >= 256:
            continue
        row, col = divmod(char_code, 16)
        chars[row][col] = chr(char_code)

    fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(8, 4))
    ax.set_title(os.path.basename(path))
    ax.set_axis_off()

    table = ax.table(
        cellText=chars,
        rowLabels=labelr,
        colLabels=labelc,
        rowColours=["palegreen"] * 16,
        colColours=["palegreen"] * 16,
        cellColours=[[".95" for c in range(16)] for r in range(16)],
        cellLoc='center',
        loc='upper left',
    )
    for key, cell in table.get_celld().items():
        row, col = key
        if row > 0 and col > -1:  # Beware of table's idiosyncratic indexing...
            cell.set_text_props(font=Path(path))

    fig.tight_layout()
    plt.show()


if __name__ == "__main__":
    from argparse import ArgumentParser

    parser = ArgumentParser(description="Display a font table.")
    parser.add_argument("path", nargs="?", help="Path to the font file.")
    parser.add_argument("--print-all", action="store_true",
                        help="Additionally, print all chars to stdout.")
    args = parser.parse_args()

    if args.print_all:
        print_glyphs(args.path)
    draw_font_table(args.path)