sometimes in fancy articles you might see the first letter is large and ornate which is most likely a path also like you said glyph IDs always don't necessarily

sometimes in fancy articles you might see the first letter is large and ornate which is most likely a path also like you said glyph IDs always don't necessarily map to unicode or the creator can intentionally mangle the 'to unicode' map of Identity-H embedded font in the pdf if he is nasty