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

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Presentation Forms

The term presentation form is generally used to mean a kind of abstract shape that represents a standard way to display a character or group of characters in a particular context as specified by a particular writing system. The term glyph by itself may refer to either presentation forms or to glyph images. Examples of characters with multiple presentation forms include

• Arabic characters that vary in appearance depending on the characters surrounding them

• Latin or Arabic ligatures, which are single forms that represent a sequence of characters

• Japanese kana and CJK punctuation characters, which vary in appearance depending on whether they are to be displayed horizontally or vertically

• Katakana full-width and half-width variants

A coded character set may encode presentation forms instead of or in addition to its basic characters.