glossary 309
glyph A distinctive form of a given character. In the Unicode character iden-
tification system, a single character may be represented by more than one
glyph, for example a capital A and a small-capital a. The term is also used in
the context of a typographic element that may or may not stand on its own as
a typeset character. Accents are glyphs in this context, as are the representa-
tions of the letters of the alphabet. An accent glyph can be added to a character
glyph to create a unique character (e.g., `
+
a
=
à), although that hybrid is not
normally called a glyph but a character. Thus a small number of glyphs can be
used to gen ...

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