fmcg.fyi

A design for a character – for example a letter, a number, or a symbol. Glyphs are the individual component parts that together make up a font.

These days, there are thousands of possible glyphs, from commonly used alphabetical characters to symbols and even emoji. The Unicode specification outlines what they are, and fonts can choose to implement as many of them as they like.

In practice, free fonts will often have a smaller number of glyphs, whereas professionally developed, paid-for fonts from type foundries include more. Some, like Roboto, developed by Google to be the default font for Android smartphones, include tens of thousands of glyphs, supporting every possible alphabet, currency symbol, and other character that might crop up in a passage of text or an app.