User Guide

FontLab 4
20
Ba si c T e r m s
We cannot go any further without defining a few terms that are critical to
understanding FontLab and fonts in general.
Character
The minimal unit of the written language – a part of the alphabet, a
symbol.
Any picture that can be recognized as having the same meaning represents
the same character:
All the pictures above mean the character ‘A’
Please note that sometimes pictures that look the same represent different
characters:
Latin ‘A’
Cyrillic ‘A’
Greek ‘Alpha’
Characters have codes that are used to store text data on a computer.
Glyph
The basic element of the font, literally – an image that is printed. All glyphs
are unique, even if they represent the same character.
Glyphs are used to represent characters. Please note that many different
glyphs may be used to represent the same character, even in the same font: