font-specific encoding: how to find out?

[Oliver Knoll]

Hi,

how can I find out wheter a given font (given by it's file path) uses
"font-specific" encoding or not?

E.g. Wingbats, Webdings, Symbol etc. fonts (= "symbol fonts") use
their own "hard-coded" encoding. I need support for scalable fonts
only (Type 1, TrueType, Speedo).

I tried parsing the fonts.dir, but on my system there are 2 entries
e.g. for Symbol.ttf, one indicating
-monotype-Symbol-...-iso8xxx (can't remember)
and the 2nd
-monotype-Symbol-...-microsoft-symbol
(which would indicate a symbol font).

Someone on comp.fonts told me that some programs need the first entry
as well for some reasons. So parsing the fonts.dir is of no big help
for me :/

Neither is parsing the *.afm files, since not every font has them and
the entry
EncodingScheme FontSpecific
doesn't necessarily mean it's a "symbol" font.

My code needs also to run on any Unix platform, that is I DON'T have
Xft support on AIX, for example! (I have a working solution using Qt
and Xft).

Any XLib calls which give me the desired information? Any other libs
which run everywhere (=on all Unix platforms) which are useful for
parsing font files/give me the desired info?

Or do I need to parse the font file data myself? (I have code which
does that at least for Microsoft TrueType fonts...)

Thanks, Oliver

p.s. I need this info for PDF export with PDFLib, where I need to
specify "builtin" or "winansi" for a given font, depending whether
it's a "symbol" font or not.