extract the structure of a letter

Question

Say I have the letter 'a'. My objective is to redraw the letter using 'little colored flowers'. How do I extract the path/structure/blueprint of a letter in order to use it as a path for my custom draw?

Answer 1

See this article: Low-level text rendering. The long second listing outlines the use of the CTFontCreatePathForGlyph() function. You probably don't need to include all the setup that takes place in that listing if you just want to convert a single glyph rather than multiple lines of text.