Introduction to the Unicode Character-Glyph Model: What you need to know
about processing and rendering multilingual text
Edwin Hart - The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory
| Intended Audience: |
Managers, Software Engineers, Systems Analysts |
| Session Level: |
Beginner, Intermediate |
The advent of multilingual information processing with
Unicode requires the designer to have a deeper knowledge
of rendering characters for display and printing than is
necessary for a single script, like Latin. Rendering
technology that is adequate for one language of the Latin
script, like English, may prove totally inadequate for high-end
typography or for scripts such as Arabic or Devanagari. This
presentation introduces a framework to characterize a character
in terms of its information, associated shape (or glyph) and the
relationships between these two attributes. It first differentiates
between the domains of characters and of glyphs, and when it is
appropriate to do processing in one domain versus the
other. Next, it describes three different technologies used
to render Unicode characters into glyphs. Finally, it describes
several design considerations.
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