Get Font Glyphs as Vectors, manipulate and product SVG or Bitmap

Question

I have an application that needs to apply some transformations to text (including non-affine transformations). Does anyone know of a toolkit (or group of tools) that would l

Answer 1

While Batik is a good answer, it will convert only TrueType fonts to SVG Fonts. If you have OpenType fonts, and they more and more dominate now, you can use FontForge to get an SVG Font for these. Another advantage of using OpenType is that the produced SVG uses not only quadratic but also cubic Beziers in the path which is more effective.