Thanks for this. Two notes:

>Re-reading it, it's not "all ligatures" that are gone with
"Unicode-compliant fonts", but it spoke about the em- and en-dashes and
double quotes. So on these ones, I plead guilty.

Alright. Not a big deal, it seems to me.

>But starting with "modern fonts", "modern system", "archaic" and the
like, it's like starting with: "only Adolf Hitler would still use not
Unicode fonts".

Looking here: http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?item_id=xetex_faq I cannot find this; you'll have to help me out.

But still: it's not about being Adolf Hitler by any means. XeTeX aims to be a Unicode compliant system, and that means adhering to the Unicode standard. I personally don't see a need to defend the purpose and use of standards. If you don't want to, don't; you are free, as you said, to do as you please, and no one is disputing that. But then you and everyone else have to accept the obvious consequences. For all its flaws (and even the encoding I helped to author has them), to *me* (and to the authors of the FAQ you're looking at) the benefits far far outweigh the downsides.

Best

KF