According to the Unicode terminology(and my paraphrasing), a typeface is a set of similar fonts with a theme placing them together, while a font is a specifically formed set out of variances like italic, bold, serif, sanserif, etc. of such typeface set.
To me it perfectly matches the definition of glyph, but perhaps it is used in other contexts(linguistics vs computer engineering.)
A typeface is a family, with variants such as bold, italic, smallcaps, and so on. As an example, "Arial" is a typeface, while the bold, italic and smallcaps variants of Arial are fonts. A font is a collection of glyphs, where a glyph is the single figure representing, say, a character or some other symbol.
Would you remind me the difference betweer character and code point? I keep confusing the two. Thank you.
Basically, a code point is an abstract numerical value representing a character. The character 'A' has the ASCII-code point 65. Computer works with code points, and the monitor displays a pattern of pixels that forms the shape of a character that you as a human can recognize.
A font, combined with some mechanisms that don't vary from font to font (such as Unicode normalization and low-level drawing), is in its general form a program that produces a raster image from a string (i.e. a sequence of codepoints representing characters), given parameters like point size and choice of variant glyphs.
Sometimes this general operation is simplified, most commonly by rendering individual characters (giving up kerning, ligatures, contextual alternates etc.), caching results (giving up random glyph variations and contextual influences), producing vector outlines (giving up hinting).
The simplest types of fonts and font rendering systems, such as those for fixed-width terminals, directly map individual code points to constant bitmap glyphs, but it's only a degenerate form of a more complex process.
