[glitch]

The trick is to use a font that has ligatures, but not to use the ligature characters directly. Let the presentation choose the glyphs to display, and let the encoded characters remain separate as they should. CSS handles this with "font-variant-ligatures" (works in some browsers). I just did a test in Chrome on OS X; toggling between "font-variant-ligatures: common-ligatures" and "font-variant-ligatures: none" changed the presentation, but it did not negatively impact the accessibility, searchability, etc. as the ligature characters would. Automatic glyph substitution in presentation yay; encoded character substitution nay.