Examples of characters include the Latin capital letter A , the Arabic letter jim , and the dingbat black scissors . A glyph is a shape that may represent one or many characters when displayed by a window system or printed by a printer. While glyphs roughly correspond to characters in most cases, this correspondence is not, in general, one to one. A coded character set need not use 8-bit integers to index characters. A typeface is a particular style or design, such as Times Italic, while a fount is a molten-lead incarnation of a given typeface at a given size.
Digital fonts come in font files .
A font file contains all the information necessary for generating glyphs of a given typeface, and applications using font files may access glyph information in arbitrary order. Digital fonts may consist of bitmap data, in which case they are said to be bitmap fonts . They may also consist of a mathematical description of glyph shapes, in which case they are said to be scalable fonts . The glyph data in a digital font needs to be indexed somehow. How this is done depends on the font file format.