see http://cl.ly/ExxK :)

It is possible but it will be with some detours....

Is there a way to go back and forth between a list of glyphs and a string? For example,

Go from this:

['H', 'e', 'l', 'l', 'o', 'exclam']

to this:

"Hello!"

and back again? Seems like there should be something like this built into one of the included packages, but I don't know where to start looking.

you can use something similar:

## this is used internally to split inputted text to a list of glyph names based on the current font
from lib.UI.spaceCenter.glyphSequenceEditText import splitText
from robofab.interface.all.dialogs import AskString

## get some text
text = AskString("input")
print "input:", text

font = CurrentFont()

## the character map
cmap = font.getCharacterMapping()

## split the text based on the camp in to a list of glyph names
glyphNameList = splitText(text, cmap)

print "as glyph names list:", glyphNameList

## loop over the glyph names asks for their unicode value in the current font
## convert it back to text based on that unicode value
backToText = u""
for glyphName in glyphNameList:
    if glyphName in font:
        glyph = font[glyphName]
        if glyph.unicode is not None:
            backToText += u"%s" % (unichr(glyph.unicode))
        else:
            backToText += "/%s " % glyphName    
    else:
        backToText += "/%s " % glyphName

print "backtoText:", backToText

hope this makes sense.

Essentially, though, I have a little window built with vanilla with a textEditor in it, and I want to get and set the text in the Space Center text field. This is in the form of a list of glyph names, while the vanilla textEditor field is in the form of a string.

The font I'm using is whatever the default is in the vanilla textEditor field (Helvetica of some kind).

I'm kind of guessing what you want to achieve but maybe this can help to.

A SpaceCenter object also has a setRaw and getRaw methods, expecting a string, text as input or return.

from robofab.interface.all.dialogs import AskString
from mojo.UI import CurrentSpaceCenter

sp = CurrentSpaceCenter()

text = AskString("input")
sp.setRaw(text)

(I've just updated http://doc.robofont.com/api/mojo/mojo-ui/ with getRaw and setRaw)

Sorry for not being clearer about what I was trying to accomplish -- I could have spared you from writing all that code in your previous response. I appreciate your time.

http://www.ms-studio.com/Robofont/PangrammerHelper.py

It's a little window for composing pangrams. If Space Center is active, it displays them there as well.