Glyphing

Glyphing is the process of creating and rendering glyphs—the graphical shapes that represent characters—in a writing system or font. In typography, a glyph is a particular visual form of a character, and a single character may have multiple glyphs across different fonts, weights, languages, or stylistic sets.

Practically, glyphing covers designing the outlines that form each glyph, assigning it a digital identity (such as a Unicode code point), and organizing these shapes into a font. The work includes letters, numerals, punctuation, diacritics, and any ligatures or alternative forms required by the script or typographic design. Font designers also consider metrics, spacing (kerning), diacritic placement, and, for some scripts, contextual forms that change shape depending on neighboring glyphs.

Digital typography uses OpenType or similar technologies to enable features such as ligatures, contextual substitutions, swashes, and multiple stylistic sets, all of which expand the set of glyphs available under a single font. Glyphing thus interfaces with linguistic encoding, typographic aesthetics, and functional readability across sizes and devices.

In historical and archaeological contexts, "glyph" can refer to a carved or inscribed symbol; "glyphing" may describe the act of carving such marks into stone, metal, or other media, as studied in epigraphy and archaeology.

Etymology: from Greek glyphē, "carving, engraving."