Sometimes its easier to just look at youyr hardware a different way and rewire it to match.
For example, here are two parts advertised as common cathode and common anode (from futurlec.com).
You can see that if you orient them so the common anodes are connected in rows going across and the common cathodes are connected in columns going up, they are the same functionally, with just different IO pins.
So you can use them interchangeably as long as you determine where the top left corner LED is for instance and connect your anode and cathode accordingly and follow suit for the rest of the pins.
For these parts for example:
common cathode, anode-pin9 and cathode-pin16 turns on the top left; common anode, anode-pin8 and cathode-pin9 turns on the top left.
