scope:

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 examples from characters coded in ISO/IEC 10646 and glyphs registered according to ISO/IEC 10036.

This Technical Report

- differentiates between coded characters 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 identifiers 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 lSO/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.