Extracting purely the strokes for each glyph of a metafont

Question

I am trying to attain a specific effect often seen on dials, gauges and telegraphs from the early 1900's e.g. from this link

As these where hand-drawn these would generally use a fix-width stroke yet be transformed radially or otherwise sheared as to follow the dial, gauge or strip its shape.

Now if one transforms a (modern) font 'normally' then rather than a fixed-width stroke; one gets the width of the strokes transformed too.

So I am wondering if is possible to easily extract, for each glyph, the stroke-path of a metafont - so I can use that as the basis of a set of strokes one can then transform and 'paint' across fixed with. Or if one could extract such easily from one of the intermediate formats.

Answer 1

Guess this is not really an answer - but found the Hershey fonts and created some code:

Hershey Engraving Fonts (github)

to accomplish this 'raw' as Bezier paths.