Glyphs

Glyphs are discrete representations of a character. They are what characters are mapped to. Each provider maps characters to a certain type of glyph. Different providers can use the same type of glyph, and thus glyphs are very detail agnostic.

The types are:

Metrics

Metrics are a set of measurements that describe a glyph's dimensions and content boundaries. Measurements begin from an imaginary bottom-left corner of the glyph's whole canvas, and extend infinitely on.

The 4 measurements are:

  • left: distance from left edge to the beginning of the content

  • right: distance from left edge to the end of the content

  • bottom: distance from bottom edge to the beginning of the content

  • top: distance from bottom edge to the end of the content

../_images/metrics.webp

In the above figure, where red represents the glyph's cell:

  • The green left metric is 1

  • The purple right metric is 6

  • The blue bottom metric is 2

  • The yellow top metric is 8

Bearings

The width and height bearings are pairs of (left, right) and (bottom, top), respectively. So, in the above figure:

  • width bearing is (1, 6)

  • height bearing is (2, 8)

API

mcfonts.glyph.Glyph

mcfonts.glyph.GlyphMetrics