Hraban and Max, thanks for replying.
Max, Hraban, and others who may be interested...
(More possibly-relevant details of the issue are found at the bottom of
this message.)
On Wed, Sep 2, 2026 at 03:07 (-0600), Max Chernoff wrote:
> 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 explicitly set the paper size in this document, so that isn't ("shouldn't
be") the issue.
> (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?
Maybe that has something to do with it. Indeed, diffpdf (using its
"appearance" comparison) does show differences for some of the text which
looks identical to my visual observation. In my experience that can happen
from very small spacing differences, as well as the appearance of the
glyphs themselves. So maybe there is something there.
> 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".
I tried that on the standalone version (no change). Given the TL version
is working the same as the standalone version did in June, I am loathe to
mess with that. I guess I could back up the TL version and do that, but
since it "works" for me (i.e., it gives me the expected output) I'd try
that as some last resort.
(More details below on what is happening, which indicate the standalone now
doing something unexpected/unintuitive.)
> 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?
I doubt it. All the text, images, ..., are the same, just some text
appears where it shouldn't (shouldn't as per my expectations and desires).
> 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.
I really doubt this is a problem, since, as I mention above in the message,
the TL version behaves the same as standalone did in June.
> 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.
Non-deterministic typesetting is a bit disturbing to me.
> 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.
I am not using any modules.
> 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).
I am not using that font. pdffonts says
XJWESD+LMRoman10-Regular
URAGMB+LMRoman10-Bold
GUNWMV+LMSans10-Regular
XTYCLB+LMRomanSlant10-Regular
LYADNC+LatinModernMath-Regular
OTPCUF+LMRoman10-Italic
PHHTUV+LMRomanCaps10-Regular
OXNTIK+LMMonoLt10-Bold
PHVKRL+LMMonoSlant10-Regular
EREARS+LMMono10-Regular
(although the 6 initial letters differ between the PDF from standalone and
the PDF from TL).
> 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)
Here is a portion of the code where the problem occurs:
I output 20 figures using \placefigure like this:
\placefigure[height,low,0*hang]{blah blah blah}
{\externalfigure[figureN][frame=on,height=0.45\textheight]}
The "blah blah blah" changes from one figure to the next, as does the
height= specification.
These are followed by
\flushsidefloats
\blank[medium]
{\bfa Yada yada yada:}
\startitemize[packed][distance=7.5em, leftmargindistance=2em,]
\sym {\bf Alice} blah blah blah.
\sym {\bf Bob} blah blah blah.
\stopitemize
With TL, the "Yada yada yada" comes out after all the figures, as I want.
With the current standalone, it comes out after the third (!) figure (but
the items come out after the last figure).
While playing with this, I found a solution or work-around:
If I use
\blank[medium,force]
instead of just
\blank[medium]
the "Yada yada yada" comes out after the figures, as desired.
But this still makes me wonder why
(1) standalone needs that an TL doesn't, and
(2) why does standaline behave differently than it did in June?
Although I have a work-around/fix, I'd still light to be enlightened on
those two questions. Can both of these be related to changed font metrics
of the LM fonts?
Thanks.
Jim
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