Glyph

From CharacterDB

One feature of Chinese characters is the glyph form describing the visual representation. This feature doesn’t need to be unique and so many characters can be found in different writing variants e.g. character 福 (English: luck) which has numerous forms (Glyph 福/0, Glyph 福/1).

The Unicode Consortium does not include same characters of different actual shape in the Unicode standard (called Z-variants), except a few “double” entries which are included as to maintain backward compatibility. In fact a code point represents an abstract character not defining any visual representation. Thus a distinct appearance description including strokes and stroke order cannot be simply assigned to a code point but one needs to deal with the notion of glyphs, each representing a distinct appearance to which a visual description can be applied.

Features of a glyph are the character decomposition, stroke order and stroke count.

[edit] Glyphs and Locales

Varying stroke count, stroke order or decomposition into character components for different character locales is implemented using different glyphs. take for example character 这. It has two glyphs, one with 7 strokes (这/0), one with 8 strokes (这/1). The first have the modern HZW stroke (merged), where the second use the traditional count and strokes HP-W (2 strokes).

In most cases one might only be interested in a single visual appearance, the “standard” one. This is handled through a mapping of glyphs to a specific character locale.