devdocs/elisp/character-display.html


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 <h3 class="section">Character Display</h3> <p>This section describes how characters are actually displayed by Emacs. Typically, a character is displayed as a <em>glyph</em> (a graphical symbol which occupies one character position on the screen), whose appearance corresponds to the character itself. For example, the character ‘<samp>a</samp>’ (character code 97) is displayed as ‘<samp>a</samp>’. Some characters, however, are displayed specially. For example, the formfeed character (character code 12) is usually displayed as a sequence of two glyphs, ‘<samp>^L</samp>’, while the newline character (character code 10) starts a new screen line. </p> <p>You can modify how each character is displayed by defining a <em>display table</em>, which maps each character code into a sequence of glyphs. See <a href="display-tables">Display Tables</a>. </p> <table class="menu" border="0" cellspacing="0"> <tr>
<td align="left" valign="top">• <a href="usual-display" accesskey="1">Usual Display</a>
</td>
<td> </td>
<td align="left" valign="top">The usual conventions for displaying characters. </td>
</tr> <tr>
<td align="left" valign="top">• <a href="display-tables" accesskey="2">Display Tables</a>
</td>
<td> </td>
<td align="left" valign="top">What a display table consists of. </td>
</tr> <tr>
<td align="left" valign="top">• <a href="active-display-table" accesskey="3">Active Display Table</a>
</td>
<td> </td>
<td align="left" valign="top">How Emacs selects a display table to use. </td>
</tr> <tr>
<td align="left" valign="top">• <a href="glyphs" accesskey="4">Glyphs</a>
</td>
<td> </td>
<td align="left" valign="top">How to define a glyph, and what glyphs mean. </td>
</tr> <tr>
<td align="left" valign="top">• <a href="glyphless-chars" accesskey="5">Glyphless Chars</a>
</td>
<td> </td>
<td align="left" valign="top">How glyphless characters are drawn. </td>
</tr> </table><div class="_attribution">
  <p class="_attribution-p">
    Copyright &copy; 1990-1996, 1998-2022 Free Software Foundation, Inc. <br>Licensed under the GNU GPL license.<br>
    <a href="https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Character-Display.html" class="_attribution-link">https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/elisp/Character-Display.html</a>
  </p>
</div>