AFAIK, -- and --- aren't active, but they (should) produce ligatures, so the problem is most probably at the level of the tfms you produced. How did you obtain them? By running texfont? Which encoding are you using? \defaultencoding expands to 'ec' these days (used to be 'texnansi'). Perhaps that is the problem? so fonts converted by texfont and using --enc=ec should have the dashes enabled automagically. ... In general, texnansi still seems to be doing a better job with this sort of thing. The ligkern instructions are not mentioned explicitly in texnansi.enc, but they are still used, so I assume texfont has them hardwired into its own code somewhere. May be Adam knows more about it?
Thank you. I'm using ec, but tried also texnansi without changes. The TFMs are generated by texfont, but long ago; I should try to re- generate them. Other fonts have no problems. endash and emdash are defined in the texfont-generated AFMs (original is TTF); I can't read TFM... Grüßlis vom Hraban! --- http://www.fiee.net/texnique/ http://contextgarden.net http://www.cacert.org (I'm an assurer)