PDF glossary
Glyph
A single drawn shape in a font, such as the letter a, the fi ligature or a bullet.
Characters are abstract (the letter A). Glyphs are the concrete shapes a font uses to draw them. One character can have several glyphs, and one glyph can stand for several characters, as in ligatures.
PDF text is stored as glyph codes. Turning those codes back into characters for search and copy needs a map, usually the ToUnicode map.
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