How to get all characters of the font with CTFontCopyCharacterSet() in Swift?

Question

How does one get all characters of the font with CTFontCopyCharacterSet() in Swift? ... for macOS?

The issue occured when implementing the approach from an

Answer 1

You can do something like this.

let cs = CTFontCopyCharacterSet(font) as NSCharacterSet
let bitmapRepresentation = cs.bitmapRepresentation

The format of the bitmap is defined in the reference page for CFCharacterSetCreateWithBitmapRepresentation

Answer 2

CFCharacterSet is toll-free bridged with the Cocoa Foundation counterpart NSCharacterSet, and can be bridged to the corresponding Swift value type CharacterSet:

let charset = CTFontCopyCharacterSet(ctFont) as CharacterSet

Then the approach from NSArray from NSCharacterSet can be used to enumerate all Unicode scalar values of that character set (including non-BMP points, i.e. Unicode scalar values greater than U+FFFF).

The CTFontGetGlyphsForCharacters() expects non-BMP characters as surrogate pair, i.e. as an array of UTF-16 code units.

Putting it together, the function would look like this:

func createUnicodeFontMap(ctFont: CTFont) ->  [CGGlyph : UnicodeScalar] {

    let charset = CTFontCopyCharacterSet(ctFont) as CharacterSet

    var glyphToUnicode = [CGGlyph : UnicodeScalar]() // Start with empty map.

    // Enumerate all Unicode scalar values from the character set:
    for plane: UInt8 in 0...16 where charset.hasMember(inPlane: plane) {
        for unicode in UTF32Char(plane) << 16 ..< UTF32Char(plane + 1) << 16 {
            if let uniChar = UnicodeScalar(unicode), charset.contains(uniChar) {

                // Get glyph for this `uniChar` ...
                let utf16 = Array(uniChar.utf16)
                var glyphs = [CGGlyph](repeating: 0, count: utf16.count)
                if CTFontGetGlyphsForCharacters(ctFont, utf16, &glyphs, utf16.count) {
                    // ... and add it to the map.
                    glyphToUnicode[glyphs[0]] = uniChar
                }
            }
        }
    }

    return glyphToUnicode
}