you can draw any string / formattedString into a bezierPath with bezierPath.text and bezierPath.textBox
see http://www.drawbot.com/content/shapes/bezierPath.html#drawBot.context.baseContext.BezierPath.text
for the rest of your questions, Im missing some source data, to get you a proper answer. As type has no fill color, your grey values must come from somewhere else.
A dedicated Maurice-category would be good plan, only if you build a Maurice-bot that answers directly 
outside the app DrawBot, when using DrawBot as a module, you have to call drawBot.newDrawing() to reset the drawing stack.
see https://www.drawbot.com/content/canvas/pages.html#drawBot.newDrawing
its also adviced to call drawBot.endDrawing() when you are done.
see https://www.drawbot.com/content/canvas/pages.html#drawBot.endDrawing
Adding bezierPath.expandStroke(width, lineCap="round", lineJoin="round", miterLimit=10) (thanks to Bahman Eslami)
Improved internal OpenType feature tags setting
Improved complex formattedString type setting
Improved alignment with text() and FormattedString
Added a DrawBot frontend for pip/PyPI to make it super easy to install third-party packages: see menu Python -> Install Python Packages...
Fixed text stroke behavior (but is a breaking change): strokeWidth on text no longer scales with the fontSize
Removed support for .mov export on 10.15 and up (QTKit is no longer supported there)
Fixed extracting single frames from .gif files
Improved setup.py, so drawbot-as-a-module can be easily installed with pip using a github URL
All test now run on Travis CI (and soon also on GitHub Actions)
Removed Python 2 code
Many small issues were fixed
DrawBot uninstalls the font after the script is done, so its only accessible during run time of the script.
There are some issues when reinstalling a font in the app itself where the postscript name is the still the same.
This has been fixed upstream. Will try to built a fresh release after the weekend
see the release notes: https://forum.drawbot.com/topic/203/drawbot3-121-is-released
numpy is not embedded into DrawBot and the latest DrawBot is python 3.7 and it can only add local packages installed with the same python version.
If you want to use numpy you need to install 3.7, get it here https://www.python.org/downloads/ and install numpy locally
good luck!
get a pre-release version here http://static.typemytype.com/drawBot/DrawBot10.15.dmg
see the pull request on github to see the changes and follow up the discussion
CTFeatureSelectorIdentifier is not available anymore on 10.15, let me check
Jumping to python 3.7
If you use external packages you will need to install them for python 3.7. If you don't have python 3.7 installed you will need to do that first.
Improved syntax highlighting for python 3
Fallback fonts are also used in a svg context.
listNamedInstances() lists all named instances for a variable font.
BezierPath objects have bezierPath.line(pt1, pt2) and bezierPath.polygon(pt1, pt2, ...) methods.
Update internal packages!
continue here https://github.com/typemytype/drawbot/issues/301
thanks!
you can also use a FlattenPen from fontPens
https://github.com/robotools/fontPens/blob/master/Lib/fontPens/flattenPen.py#L9
there is a option to provide an imageResolution where you can raise the image resolution, the default is 72.
see all options here
good luck
mm strange, can you send an example script that fails with this traceback
A wild guess is that the drawBot package is not installed.
Did you do this last step (next to installing all the dependencies)
cd path/To/drawBot
pytho3.7 setup.py install
I guess you have an other packages installed also called vanilla. Which is not the vanilla required by DrawBot...
A similar issue see: https://github.com/robotools/vanilla/issues/88#issuecomment-464800669
If you use pip to manage your packages, please use the requirements provided by drawbot.
good luck
mmm, generate an instance with fontTools, use that font with a path and generate the pdf?
wondering if the Bad font object... error is also reported with old-style-static-fonts?
I think you can go far with fake straight lines where the anchors points are on 1/3 of the line length and a meshed grid. This will not be as accurate as a the image transformation.
Illustrator has a mesh tool, so it must possible to transform any vector. And there will be python libraries or even numpy able to do this...
Looking forward to your progress!
you'll need to draw the path on a distorted "grid" 
like this one
