Once your browser or app has worked out what characters it is dealing with, it will then look in the font for glyphs it can use to display definitions of the shapes used to display characters.

How do fonts fit into this?Ī font is a collection of glyph definitions, ie. You will just need to be sure that you consider the advice in the Most of the time, however, you will not need to know the details. The section Additional information provides a little more detail for those who are interested.

many different ways of mapping between bytes,Ĭode points and characters. Unfortunately, there are many different character sets and character encodings, ie. So, when you input text using a keyboard or in some other way, the character encoding maps characters you choose to specific bytes in computer memory, and then to display the text it reads the bytes back into characters. You shouldīe aware of this usage, but stick to using the term character encodings whenever you can. The misleading term charset is often used to refer to what are in reality character encodings. Without the key, the data looks like garbage. It is a set of mappings between the bytes in the computer and the characters in the character set. A character encoding provides a key to unlock (ie. Basically, you can visualise this by assuming that all characters are stored in computers using a special code, like the ciphers used in espionage.

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