Re: Java Newbie Question: Character Sets, Unicode, et al

From: Roedy Green (roedy_at_seewebsite.com)
Date: 10/21/03


Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2003 23:57:20 GMT

On Mon, 20 Oct 2003 09:06:41 -0500, "John C. Bollinger"
<jobollin@indiana.edu> wrote or quoted :

>mmm. I thought that there was a clear distinction between characters
>and glyphs. Character sets map characters to numeric codes (and vise
>versa), whereas fonts map glyphs to characters. There may be many
>different glyphs that represent any particular character (hence the
>differentiation of fonts), and in some cases a character may require
>more than one glyph. A character is a logical entity, without an
>inherent physical representation. Or so I thought. Am I suffering from
>a longstanding confusion here?

Ve need some definitions that make clear the distinction between:
an character set,
a character
a glyph
a font
an encoding.

--
Canadian Mind Products, Roedy Green.
Coaching, problem solving, economical contract programming. 
See http://mindprod.com/jgloss/jgloss.html for The Java Glossary.


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