A glyph is the particular look of a
character. Note that this is extremely specific; the glyph "a" is different from "
a" and both are different from "
a". Virtually everyone insitinctively abstracts away from glyphs to characters, so the only people who are usually aware of them are people working with fonts (or doing advanced type-setting, or anything else like that.)
A glyph may be implemented as a bitmap (mostly for low resolution) or as vector graphics describing the outlines. Very simple bitmap example, from
strimj - string image routines:
"[email protected]
[email protected]@@
[email protected]@@@@
@@@@@@@
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
@@@@@@@
[email protected]@@@@
[email protected]@@
[email protected]"