Comment by hnfong
2 days ago
Sorry, probably not very standard terminology. I somehow picked it up from the OReilly book: Fonts & Encodings: From Advanced Typography to Unicode and Everything in Between
Page 55:
""" there are characters with no glyphs. glyphs that can correspond to a number of different characters according to context. Glyphs that correspond to multiple characters at the same time (with weightings assigned to each), and even more possibilities.
The problem of glyphs and characters is so complex that it has gone beyond the realm of computer specialists and has come to be of interest even to philosophers. For example, the Japanese philosopher Shigeki Moro, who has worked with ideographic characters in Buddhist documents, goes so far in his article Surface or Essence: Beyond Character Model Set [274] as to say that Unicode's approach is Aristotelian essentialist and to recommend supplanting it by an approach inspired by Jacques Derrida's theory of writing [114, 115]. The reader interested in the philosophical aspects of the issue is invited to consult [165,156], in addition to the works cited above. """
I think "essentialist" is probably a good description of the philosophy of how Unicode defines characters as opposed to fonts and glyphs, so I adopted it.
Are there examples of characters with no glyphs and glyphs with multiple characters? Does it mean there is a motion of a certain word but nobody knows how to write it or there are multiple ways to write it? When going from traditional to simplified Chinese many words with different meanings were merged which is kinda weird. Like sprout 發 and hair 髮 now being a single word 发. Is that what its trying to say?
I haven’t been deep into Unicode for a long time, so I can’t remember all the intricacies of the word “glyph”.
So I’m not sure if there are glyphs with multiple characters but there _are_ code points with multiple characters. E.g, you can enter the correct code point and still misspell a Chinese or Japanese word. This is because for Chinese Korean and Japanese characters in Unicode it is not enough to choose the correct code point but also markup the code point with the correct language.
It's probably saying something like the space characters (eg. 0x20) have no glyphs. And examples of "glyphs with multiple characters" would be those characters that look exactly like the ASCII alphabets that lead to things like domain spoofing etc.
That's my interpretation, disclaimer I'm not an expert in this stuff.