Getting glyphs for characters

[stefan]

Hello everybody,

Can someone tell me how i can get a glyph for a character? I need
this for the PDFImageRep i'm currently working on. In ViewIt 0.6
it uses NSStringDrawing to place characters on the screen, but the
the position of the characters is shifted up a bit and drawing speed
it also not overhelming. With backart, NSFont provides a method
glyphForCharacter. Using this works fine in my development version,
characters are placed exactly where i want them and drawing a
page is also done much much faster. The only problem with this
method is that i think it's specific to backart. So i need
a common way to get a glyph for a character. I already looked at
NSStringDrawing/NSLayoutManager but i have no idea what the
code in this classes does.

thanks
Stefan