Glyph
In
typography, a glyph is the shape given in a particular
typeface to a specific grapheme or
symbol.
The term for the abstract entity represented by a glyph is character: a typographical character may be a grapheme , but also a numeral, a punctuation mark, or a pictorial or decorative symbol .
Two or more glyphs representing the same grapheme, either interchangeably or context-dependent, are called allographs.
In graphonomics, the term glyph is used for a non-character, i.e: either a sub-character or multi-character pattern.
Encyclopedia
In
typography, a
glyph is the shape given in a particular
typeface to a specific grapheme or
symbol.
The term for the abstract entity represented by a glyph is
character: a typographical character may be a grapheme , but also a numeral, a punctuation mark, or a pictorial or decorative symbol .
Two or more glyphs representing the same grapheme, either interchangeably or context-dependent, are called allographs.
In graphonomics, the term
glyph is used for a non-character, i.e: either a sub-character or multi-character pattern.
Etymology
The term has been used in English since 1727, loaned from
glyphe in use by French antiquaries , from Greek ???f? "a carving," from ???fe?? "to hollow out, engrave, carve"
Compare the carved and incised "sacred glyphs"
hieroglyphs, which have had a longer history in English dating from the first Elizabethan translation of Plutarch, who adopted "hieroglyphic" as a Latin adjective.
But "glyph" first came to widespread European attention with the engravings and lithographs from
Frederick Catherwood's drawings of undeciphered glyphs of the Maya civilization in the early 1840s.
Typography
In
typography, a
glyph a particular graphical representation of a grapheme, or sometimes several graphemes in combination , or only a part of a grapheme. In computing as well as typography, the term
character refers to a grapheme or grapheme-like unit of text, as found in natural language
writing systems . A character or grapheme is a unit of text, whereas a glyph is a
graphical unit.
For example, the sequence
ffi contains three characters, but can be represented by
one glyph, the three characters being combined into a single unit known as a ligature.
Conversely, some
typewriters require the use of multiple glyphs to depict a single character .
Most typographic glyphs originate from the characters of a
typeface. In a typeface each character typically corresponds to a single glyph, but there are exceptions, such as a font used for a language with a large alphabet or complex writing system, where one character may correspond to several glyphs, or several characters to one glyph.
See also
- Typeface
- Punchcutting
- Character encoding
- Character
