Glyph

In typography, a glyph is a graphical representation of a character, for example, a letter, a syllable character, a ligature or a character part. The glyph forms in a graphical unit.

Character and glyph

The mark ( character) is the abstract idea of a letter, the glyph is their concrete graphical representation. Electronic texts such as this one are stored as abstract symbols and their appearance depends on the font chosen.

The counterpart of glyph is grapheme. In the simplest case, for a given font ( typeface and size) of each grapheme corresponds to a single glyph. Of this there are notable differences.

In the data processing of the ambiguous English word so all the text storage, processing and presentation necessary includes character, means " abstract character", in addition to the graphemes including spaces, control and formatting characters, characters, even those that do not have associated glyph.

Ligatures

The string fl can be represented both by two separate glyphs for each f and l as well as by a single ligature glyph.

The following characters are represented as individual glyphs without ligature:

The same character is represented as ligatures. Each ligature there is a glyph:

In the special case of individual glyphs can be set to overlap to form the Ligaturglyphe.

Glyph

The same letter may also be present within a font in different design variants. Johannes Gutenberg designed to represent the character of his alphabet for the Bible pressure approximately 290 different characters.

In many sign systems there are a variety absolutely necessary position -dependent glyph of graphemes.

In the Arabic script, there are, for example, multiple glyphs for a letter, since the appearance of the letters is influenced by neighboring letters.

The Hebrew alphabet has some different shaped glyphs for the end of the word. This applies also to the Greek Sigma, which is, otherwise they are written on the end of a word with the glyph " ς " as " σ ". In the Gothic script, there are rules for the long and round s

However, different letters can also be represented by the same glyph. Thus, in most fonts, the Latin, Greek and Cyrillic include, indistinguishable from the Latin and Cyrillic large A and the great Greek Alpha from each other.

Computer

For character definition in the computer also includes the graphical form ( glyph ) and encoding ( character mapping for character position ). One and the same glyph can be used for multiple characters. For example, the umlaut ¨ were on old typewriters put on an extra button and formed so (for example, on the type wheel ) a separate glyph. Together with the letters a, o, and u, they formed the character ä, ö and ü. The same method can be ( internally ) used for the character encoding in computer programs. On different keyboard layouts - about the Spanish - can the umlaut characters are also shown or combined.

In the storage of text in computers, there are also abstract signs that are given no glyphs. The simplest examples of this are blank or newline characters. Another example of a useful supporting abstract characters with no glyph is found in mathematical formulas. For example, " 2 ⁢ a" is a form of representation of "2 × A". In the Summary of the multiplication sign one thinks so. If you want but evaluate an expression represented in the executive summary with a computer that is semantically between "2" and "a" an invisible (so glyphenloses ) multiplication sign required. It is included as U 2062 in Unicode.