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. Last updated: 1998-05-31