Abstract: Due to the lack of a universally applicable yet effective method of formal description and automatic comparison for Chinese character glyph,we can hardly input arbitrary Chinese characters by glyph drawing,nor can glyph comparison and analysis be realized with algorithms. A stroke-segment-mesh description of Chinese character glyph is presented. The stroke elements of a glyph are standardized,with suitable size,capable of depicting the glyph skeleton of any Chinese characters (including wrongly written characters,variant forms of characters in ancient literatures,and combined-characters). Based on this description,a glyph comparing algorithm is developed,which can automatically decompose a glyph into simple strokes and compound strokes,adaptively select either of them for comparison according to the shape of the glyph. It then calculates the sum of the vector distance of best-matching strokes of the two candidate characters as the comparing results. Experimental results indicate the versatility of this description and the high accuracy of the proposed algorithm. Our new approach provides support not only to Chinese character input but also to all kinds of glyph-analysis-oriented applications.