glyph

character An image used in the visual representation of

characters; roughly speaking, how a character looks. A

font is a set of glyphs.

In the simple case, for a given font (typeface and size),

each character corresponds to a single glyph but this is not

always the case, especially in a language with a large

alphabet where one character may correspond to several glyphs

or several characters to one glyph (a character encoding).

Usually used in reference to outline fonts, in particular

TrueType.

(1998-05-31)