The #cairo_glyph_t structure holds information about a single glyph when drawing or measuring text. A font is (in simple terms) a collection of shapes used to draw text. A glyph is one of these shapes. There can be multiple glyphs for a single character (alternates to be used in different contexts, for example), or a glyph can be a <firstterm>ligature</firstterm> of multiple characters. Cairo doesn't expose any way of converting input text into glyphs, so in order to use the Cairo interfaces that take arrays of glyphs, you must directly access the appropriate underlying font system.