The part of GX that is most important to readers of this manual is Line Layout, the collective name for the routines which provide high-quality typographic text automatically for GX applications. Line Layout works in conjunction with the typographic information contained in GX fonts to produce a variety of typographic effects. The typographic effects appropriate for a particular GX font depend on the design and intended purpose of the font. This section introduces the major kinds of typographic effects possible with a GX font. TrueEdit's support for each effect is discussed in detail in later chapters of this manual.
Characters are elements of language, such as letters, numbers, and punctuation marks.
Glyphs are the visual representations of characters. Or there may be several alternate glyphs for a single character, as in the Arabic script. Under QuickDraw GX, an end user enters characters into a line of text and Line Layout , working with information in the font, determines the appropriate glyphs to display. GX fonts can include more than 65,000 glyphs, along with information that tells Line Layout how and when to access each glyph. This manual uses the term glyph effects to refer to this information.