[glif] 
| 1. | a pictograph or hieroglyph. |
| 2. | a sculptured figure or relief carving. |
| 3. | Architecture. an ornamental channel or groove. |
) carving, deriv. of glýphein to hollow out
| glyph (glĭf) n.
[Greek gluphē, carving, from gluphein, to carve; see gleubh- in Indo-European roots.] glyph'ic adj. |
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)
