ealing with glyphs and characters. Challenges in encoding medieval scripts

This article investigates the meaning of the key concepts 'characters ' and 'glyphs' in the Unicode Standard with reference to medieval script, especially the runic alphabet. Two problems of font encoding are discussed in some detail: (1) the disambiguation of characters sharing the same glyphs, and (2) the delimitation of variant glyphs. Criteria are suggested for specifying the character-glyph relationship, and a minor area of the runic code chart is analyzed on the basis of these criteria. The article suggests that better documentation of variants in medieval script is needed, not only in order to identify suitable candidates for proposals to the official Unicode Standard, but also in order to explain the usage and meaning of these variants for other scholars and for font designers.