Section 21.2. Glyphs, Characters, and Maps

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21.2. Glyphs, Characters, and Maps

When you write a character to any terminal, several steps of translation may happen. The value written to the terminal is the character number, or character code. That character code is not enough to determine what to display on the screen, however. The shape depends on what font is being used. The character code 97 may be printed as an a in a font designed for rendering Latin-based languages, but might be rendered as an in a font designed for rendering Greek or mathematics. The shape that is displayed is called a glyph. The translation from character codes to glyphs is called a map.

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