Main Page | See live article | Alphabetical index A glyph is a carved figure or character, incised or in relief; a carved pictograph; hence, a pictograph representing a form originally adopted for sculpture, whether carved or painted. In typography, a glyph is a graphical representation of a character, sometimes several characters or only a part of character. A character is a textual unit whereas a glyph is a graphical unit. For example the sequence of ffi will be represented by one glyph in TeX. 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). The term is usually used in particular reference to outline fonts. This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.