Characters & Glyphs
A Characters is the smallest component of a writing system that has a semantic value. Often reffered to as a grapheme (however a grapheme may also reference multiple characters as a single character, eg. à).
A phoneme is the smallest sound unit in a spoken language.
A glyph is the reorientation of (one or more) character(s) as they are rendered/displayed.
When deciding on the set of characters for a language for purposes of representing them in
a computer, it is extremely important (e.g. for sorting, indexing purposes) to separate out
characters from glyphs:
- the underlying representation of a text should contain the character sequence only
- the final appearance of the text is the responsibility of the rendering process