: What is the difference between Glyph and Font? I was going through one document and I came across this term 'glyph'. The term was new to me so looked into wiki for its definition. I felt

@Carla748

A font is a typeface in a specific size. A glyph is a vector shape, and in your context it is [the vector shape of] a specific character from a typeface in no particular size.

A comment below suggests that digital fonts can have multiple sizes.

The word "font" is from French fonte, from Middle French, act of founding, from Vulgar Latin *fundita, feminine of funditus, past participle of Latin fundere to found or pour (in the sense of casting). It refers specifically to the founding of a typeface in lead. As pointed out by the commenter, this is necessarily in a particular size.

In digital typography, font refers to a rendering of a typeface at a particular pixel size. This non-trivial process involves hinting, alpha blending and pixel snapping according to complex rules and quite a lot of metadata.

In days of yore this was a bit much to ask for in real time and typefaces were pre-rendered at various sizes into font files. Now that rendering is done in real time on the video card, you don't install fonts, you install typefaces, but for "consistency" Apple and Microsoft (and the Linux people, for that matter) refer to them as fonts in typography management user interfaces, leading to a widespread misperception of the meaning of the word font. The font picker dialog on any given platform actually does pick a font, because it specifies a particular size.

To all you who say "language belongs to the people" I say that if an entire nation of people call a dog a cow, it still won't give milk.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Tiffany317

There are five concepts here:


Character set: maps numbers to abstract characters.
Character: An abstraction of the representation of a character in the given medium. Since we're talking graphic design, then usually we're talking about some kind of base image. In a different medium, such as audio, a character would have a sound.
Font Type: A specific set of visual conventions that are used for all related glyphs in the given font.
Font: Maps abstract characters to glyphs that adhere to the font type.
Glyph: A pictorial representation of a character.


So a font is usually a collection of glyphs, where said glyphs conform to what ever the overall visual pattern is specified by the type of the font (think: serif, vs, san serif).

Vote Up Vote Down

@Kimberly620

Words unfortunately dont have fixed meanings. A glyph is one specific sub art from a font, a letter or character if you may. But does not have to be a letter, it can be any symbol.

See a computer font is a collection of individual items and rules for forming typography, each font can include an arbitrary number of items, even many alternate items for the same thing. Each of these items in this context is usually refeered to as a glyph.

It is in fact possibly more complicated than this as its possible that one letter consist of many glyphs that in combination make up the character, its rare bit not unheard. Ofcourse glyph has also a meaning outside computer typography but thats another matter.

So glyph is the individual character in a font program.

A font can however mean more than just one full set of characters it can describe the family. But also downward some people may call glyphs fonts and thats perfectly acceptable.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Jessie844

It can be confusing because often times you find out that people use the term "font" openly to refer to many things in typography. Here's a lively discussion on fonts and typefaces.

Traditionally, font is a term used when discussing a set of characters of a certain typeface and in the same family. A font has also been used to describe a software used to produce a typeface in your design, which explains why we have our fonts licensed.

A glyph is the variety of designs of a certain character. If you have a collection of 3 different designs of the letter A, you have 3 glyphs.

Vote Up Vote Down

@Speyer780

A glyph is an individual character. It might be a letter, an accented letter, a ligature, a punctuation mark, a dingbat, etc.

A font is a digital file which is used to display a typeface, which contains the entire upper- and lowercase alphabet as well as punctuation, numbers, and other special characters.

Vote Up Vote Down