Hi Jim, On Tue, 2026-09-01 at 22:55 -0300, Jim Diamond via ntg-context wrote: > Compiling with today's stand-alone LMTX caused a bad page break, causing me > a bit of annoyance. Trying to track this issue down, I compiled my > document with TL's context. TL's context gave me a pdf which diffpdf says > is identical to the one from June (evidently diffpdf doesn't peer at the > internal organs of image files, but that is another issue).
Possible differences between TL and the Standalone Distribution: 1. The default paper size in the Standalone Distribution is always A4; in TL, it depends on a system-wide setting configured with "tlmgr paper <size>". If you've changed TL's paper size to Letter, then you'll get completely different page layout than ConTeXt's default. The solution here is to always explicitly set the paper size in your documents. (I don't like this "feature" in TL either, and I argued against applying it to ConTeXt, but it was decided that having all the programs in TL be constant with each other is more important than having ConTeXt be consistent between different distributions.) 2. The fonts in TL are packaged independently of the fonts in the Standalone Distribution, so there could be differences there. If the metrics of the LM or TeX Gyre fonts changed in TL, we would have received dozens of complaints by now, so I'm pretty sure that they didn't change there, but maybe something changed in the Standalone Distribution's fonts? 3. Perhaps this is all caused by some weird caching error? If that's the case, try deleting all the cache files, then run "mtxrun --generate" followed by "context --make". 4. The search paths are slightly different between TL and the Standalone Distribution, so maybe you have something weird in $TEXMFHOME (or similar) that's only being picked up by one of the distributions? 5. I could have screwed something up when repackaging ConTeXt for TL. Given how my scripts work, this would actually be pretty hard for me to do, but I'm also pretty good at breaking things in new and creative ways :). Typically this would lead to a total failure due to mismatched files rather than subtly different output though. 6. You've gotten unlucky enough to find a non-deterministic/chaotic page break, so you've just been measuring random noise rather than finding a "real" difference between the distributions. 7. You're loading some module in your document that's only available in TL (or the Standalone Distribution), but that affects the output when it's loaded. ConTeXt keeps going and only prints a single-line warning if you try to include a non-existent module, so it would be fairly easy to accidentally miss this. 8. TL excludes a few non-free files from ConTeXt, but these should only affect using system fonts on Windows/macOS (but you're on Linux) or using the koeieletters font (which I suspect you're not). And all of these files are available in TLContrib, which I believe that you have installed already. (1/4/6 seem like the most likely options to me) Thanks, -- Max ___________________________________________________________________________________ If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the Wiki! maillist : [email protected] / https://mailman.ntg.nl/mailman3/lists/ntg-context.ntg.nl webpage : https://www.pragma-ade.nl / https://context.aanhet.net (mirror) archive : https://github.com/contextgarden/context wiki : https://wiki.contextgarden.net ___________________________________________________________________________________
