Font encoding
A font doesn't contain characters, it contains pictures of characters, known as glyphs. The glyphs, in the form of outlines or bitmaps, constitute a particular representation of a character. Either explicitly or implicitly, each font has a table associated with it, the font encoding table, that tells for each glyph what character it is a representation for. In Type 1 fonts, the table is referred to as an encoding vector.
In fact, many fonts contain several glyphs for the same character. Which of those glyphs should be used depends either on the rules of the language, or on the preference of the designer.
In Arabic, for example, all letters have four different shapes, depending on whether the letter is used at the start of a word, in the middle, at the end, or in isolation. It is the same character in all cases, and thus there is only one character in the HTML document, but when printed, it looks differently each time.
There are also fonts that leave it to the graphic designer to choose from among various alternative shapes provided. Unfortunately, CSS1 doesn't yet provide the means to select those alternatives. Currently, it is always the default shape that is chosen from such fonts.
A font doesn't contain characters, it contains pictures of characters, known as glyphs. The glyphs, in the form of outlines or bitmaps, constitute a particular representation of a character. Either explicitly or implicitly, each font has a table associated with it, the font encoding table, that tells for each glyph what character it is a representation for. In Type 1 fonts, the table is referred to as an encoding vector.
In fact, many fonts contain several glyphs for the same character. Which of those glyphs should be used depends either on the rules of the language, or on the preference of the designer.
In Arabic, for example, all letters have four different shapes, depending on whether the letter is used at the start of a word, in the middle, at the end, or in isolation. It is the same character in all cases, and thus there is only one character in the HTML document, but when printed, it looks differently each time.
There are also fonts that leave it to the graphic designer to choose from among various alternative shapes provided. Unfortunately, CSS1 doesn't yet provide the means to select those alternatives. Currently, it is always the default shape that is chosen from such fonts.
