Characters, Glyphs and Fonts

Computers were originally designed to work with a limited set of characters primarily based on Roman script. In order to distinguish each character from the other for the purpose of storage and communication with keyboard and printer etc, each character was assigned a unique number out of the 256 possible combination within 8 bits. To ensure that data stored on one computer doesnot loose its content when transferred to another type of computer (there were many… BBC Micro, Apple, Atari, Commadore, mainframes…) a standard was agreed upon known as ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange)… Thereafter we know that ASCII codes 65,66,67… stands for A,B,C…

That’s what character is all about.

Now just think of it, can you make out how the character looks like given ASCII code 76 or say 82 or 130… OK don’t open the ASCII chart, these numbers just represent the characters for purpose of storage and communication and contains no information about how it displays… The visual representation of the character is what is called as a Glyph. As defined at http://highered.mcgraw-hill.com/sites/007299634x/student_view0/glossary.html Glyph is :

(Greek) A carving; a drawn symbol in a writing system that may stand for a syllable, a sound, an idea, a word, or a combination of these.

Your display or printing device contains information on how a characters is displayed and that’s how you see those characters.

Now for the fonts, it is a collection of glyphs for a set of characters. Your machine contains a number of fonts each of which shows out a character differently (that’s you have them in numbers). Fonts are also referred to as Typefaces, the name as was prevelant with printing presses in those days.

Fonts are broadly classified as Serifs and San Serifs. Serifs are those fonts in this the glyph for a character has varying pen width. For example Times New Roman, where pen width is not uniform and have pointed ends. The other fornts as Arial which have uniform pen widths are termed as San Serifs.