You may want to think of characters as the basic unit of data that is stored e.g. in the buffer of your text editor. While the definition of a character is intrinsically application-specific, a number of standardised collections of characters have been defined. A coded character set need not use 8 bit integers to index characters. Font files, fonts, and XLFD Traditionally, typographers speak about typefaces and founts . 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 an 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.