Unicode

Introduction
Formats
Input
Fonts
Software
Glossary

Glyph

A glyph refers to the graphical representation of a character, such as the graphical representation of a punctuation mark, letter or number. Therefore, depending on the used font one and the same letter can have a different look. Think on the character A in Times New Roman, Comic Sans, Arial or Courier New.

A normal character simply refers to the abstract idea of a character, which reveals nothing about the look and the typographical graph. This graphical representation only gets visible through a glyph defined in a font.

Therefore, Unicode is simply a code that stands for a certain character, and yet says nothing about how the actual characters will look like. This requires a font file, in which there are glyphs assigned to the corresponding Unicode code points. But there is no font on earth, in which all Unicode code points have representations (see fonts for that). In this case, another font can be used instead for this character or the character appears as a box.