Product Code Database
[[File:LowercaseG.svg|thumb| rendered with or without a looptail are allographs of each other ]]
In graphemics and typography, the term allograph is used of a glyph that is a design variant of a letter or other grapheme, such as a letter, a number, an ideograph, a punctuation mark or other typographic symbol. In graphemics, an obvious example in Latin alphabet (and many other writing systems) is the distinction between Letter case letters. Allographs can vary greatly, without affecting the underlying identity of the grapheme. Even if the word "cat" is rendered as "cAt", it remains recognizable as the sequence of the three graphemes , , .
Letters and other graphemes can also have significant variations that may be missed by many readers. The letter g, for example, has two common forms in different , and a wide variety in people's handwriting. A positional example of allography is the long s , a symbol which was once a widely used as a non-final allograph for the lowercase letter s.
A grapheme variant can acquire a separate meaning in a specialized writing system, such as the International Phonetic Alphabet used in linguistics. Several such variants have distinct in Unicode and thus are not allographs for some applications.
In Unicode, a given character is allocated a code point: all allographs of that character have the same code point and thus the essential meaning is retained irrespective of font choice at time of printing or display. Typically, for example, is given a loop tail in serif typefaces but not in sans-serif faces (e.g., Times New Roman: g, Helvetica: g) but its code point is constant and its meaning persists irrespective of typeface.
| !Standard!!Allograph!!Dictionary definition |
|
|
