Glyph
hieroglyphs, which have had a longer history in English dating from the first Elizabethan translation of Plutarch (who adapted "hieroglyphic" as a Latin adjective). But "glyph" first came to widespread European attention with the engravings and lithographs from Frederick Catherwood's drawings of undeciphered the glyphs of the Maya civilization in the early 1840s. "Glyphs" still bring connotations of Maya glyphs to mind.
In typography, a glyph is a graphical representation of a character, sometimes several characters or only a part of character. The actual glyphs in typography were originally the carved and cast characters of a font. 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, since the three characters will be combined into a single ligature.
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.
See also
