On 2013–08–17 Dmitriy Tokarev wrote:

I noticed that after the command \kerncharacters, I can not use the normal sequence "---" for em-dash. Is there any work around of this effect?

This is expected, since \kerncharacters breaks ligatures and the --- → — transformation is implemented using the ligature mechanism. You can either use — or \emdash. Since -, – and — are hardly distinguishable in the source, I'd settle for \emdash. \starttext foo --- bar\par foo — bar\par foo \emdash\ bar \kerncharacters[.5] foo --- bar\par foo — bar\par foo \emdash\ bar \stoptext Marco