Glyph

In most languages written in any variety of the Latin alphabet except English, the use of diacritics to signify a sound mutation is common.

In general, a diacritic is regarded as a glyph,[2] even if it is contiguous with the rest of the character like a cedilla in French, Catalan or Portuguese, the ogonek in several languages, or the stroke on a Polish "Ł".

Older models of typewriters required the use of multiple glyphs to depict a single character, as an overstruck apostrophe and period to create an exclamation mark.

If there is more than one allograph of a unit of writing, and the choice between them depends on context or on the preference of the author, they now have to be treated as separate glyphs, because mechanical arrangements have to be available to differentiate between them and to print whichever of them is required.

In computing as well as typography, the term "character" refers to a grapheme or grapheme-like unit of text, as found in natural language writing systems (scripts).