A typographic ligature combines two or more written forms into a single glyph. A familiar example is an “fi” shape joining the end of “f” to the following “i”. Its use can improve spacing or avoid a collision between the two shapes.
An OpenType shaping system can first map the separate text characters “f” and “i” to their default glyph indices, then apply a glyph substitution that replaces that pair by one ligature glyph index. The stored text need not be replaced by a special ligature character. Selection and copying can therefore preserve the original two-character sequence even though the display contains one glyph.[ref]
A typographic ligature also need not be produced merely by moving two glyphs closer together: substitution changes the selected form, whereas positioning changes where selected forms are drawn.

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