Difference Between Glyph and Character of a Font

More often character and glyph are used interchangeably in typographic world but there is a subtle difference between the two. Glyph is visual manifestation of a character.

For example, a, c, f, z, 1, 5, 9, are characters. A character can be written in many ways based on stylistic and linguistic needs.

Therefore, a character may consist of one or many glyphs.

For example, letter ‘g’ is written in many styles and therefore many glyphs may represent the letter ‘g’.

A document on Google Patents website defines glyph in these words: [RD]

“A glyph refers to the concrete, visual representation of a character. A glyph may represent one character (e.g., the lowercase letter “a”). A glyph may also represent more than one character (e.g., theft ligature). A glyph may also represent part of a character (e.g., the dot in the lowercase letter “i”). A glyph may also represent a nonprinting character (e.g., the space character).”

I hope now you clearly understand the difference between a font glyph and a font character.

Explore more articles about Fonts, or visit Home Page of Dozro website.