The purpose of this Technical Report is to provide a general framework for discussing characters and glyphs. The framework is applicable to a variety of coded character sets and glyph-identification schemes. For illustration, this Technical Report uses ex-amples from characters coded in ISO/IEC 10646 and glyphs registered according to ISO/IEC 10036.
This Technical Report
— differentiates between coded charac-ters and registered glyphs
— identifies the domain of use of coded characters and glyph identifiers
— provides a conceptual framework for the formatting and presentation of coded character data using glyph iden-tifiers and glyph representations
This Technical Report describes idealized principles that were not completely followed in coding characters for ISO/IEC 10646 and in registering glyphs according to ISO/IEC 10036. The fact that ISO/IEC 10646, ISO/IEC 10036, and other standards do not completely follow the principles in the model does not invalidate the model and does not diminish the utility of having the model.