PATH Mac OS 8 and 9 Developer Documentation > Text Encoding Conversion Manager
Programming With the Text Encoding Conversion Manager

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Characters

A person using a writing system thinks of a character in terms of its visual form, its written structure and its meaning in conjunction with other characters. A computer, on the other hand, deals with characters primarily in terms of their numeric encodings.

A character is a unit of information used for the organization, control, or representation of text data. Letters, ideographs, digits, and symbols in a writing system are all examples of characters. A character is associated with a name, and optionally, but commonly, with a representative image or rendering called a glyph. Glyph images are the visual elements used to represent characters. Aspects of text presentation such as font and style apply to glyph images, not to characters.

A character repertoire is a collection of distinct characters. Two characters are distinct if and only if they have distinct names in the context of an identified character repertoire. Two characters that are distinct in name may have identical images or renderings (for example, LATIN CAPITAL LETTER A and GREEK CAPITAL LETTER ALPHA). Characters constituting a character repertoire can belong to different scripts.