string - What's the difference between a character, a code point, a glyph and a grapheme?

Question

Trying to understand the subtleties of modern Unicode is making my head hurt. In particular, the distinction between code points, characters, glyphs and graphemes - concepts which in the simplest case, when dealing with English text using ASCII characters, all have a one-to-one relationship with each other - is causing me trouble.

Seeing how these terms get used in documents like Matthias Bynens' JavaScript has a unicode problem or Wikipedia's piece on Han unification, I've gathered that these concepts are not the same thing and that it's dangerous to conflate them, but I'm kind of struggling to grasp what each term means.

The Unicode Consortium offers a glossary to explain this stuff, but it's full of "definitions" like this:

Abstract Character. A unit of information used for the organization, control, or representation of textual data. ...

...

Character. ... (2) Synonym for abstract character. (3) The basic unit of encoding for the Unicode character encoding. ...

...

Glyph. (1) An abstract form that represents one or more glyph images. (2) A synonym for glyph image. In displaying Unicode character data, one or more glyphs may be selected to depict a particular character.

...

Grapheme. (1) A minimally distinctive unit of writing in the context of a particular writing system. ...

Most of these definitions possess the quality of sounding very academic and formal, but lack the quality of meaning anything, or else defer the problem of definition to yet another glossary entry or section of the standard.

So I seek the arcane wisdom of those more learned than I. How exactly do each of these concepts differ from each other, and in what circumstances would they not have a one-to-one relationship with each other?

Answer 1

• Character is an overloaded term that can mean many things.

• A code point is the atomic unit of information. Text is a sequence of code points. Each code point is a number which is given meaning by the Unicode standard.

• A code unit is the unit of storage of a part of an encoded code point. In UTF-8 this means 8 bits, in UTF-16 this means 16 bits. A single code unit may represent a full code point, or part of a code point. For example, the snowman glyph (?) is a single code point but 3 UTF-8 code units, and 1 UTF-16 code unit.

• A grapheme is a sequence of one or more code points that are displayed as a single, graphical unit that a reader recognizes as a single element of the writing system. For example, both a and ? are graphemes, but they may consist of multiple code points (e.g. ? may be two code points, one for the base character a followed by one for the diaeresis; but there's also an alternative, legacy, single code point representing this grapheme). Some code points are never part of any grapheme (e.g. the zero-width non-joiner, or directional overrides).

• A glyph is an image, usually stored in a font (which is a collection of glyphs), used to represent graphemes or parts thereof. Fonts may compose multiple glyphs into a single representation, for example, if the above ? is a single code point, a font may choose to render that as two separate, spatially overlaid glyphs. For OTF, the font's GSUB and GPOS tables contain substitution and positioning information to make this work. A font may contain multiple alternative glyphs for the same grapheme, too.