As part of the plan of debugging by trying one infrastructure at a time, I just updated to Context 2009.06.04. I downloaded and unzipped cont-tmf.zip (from pragma), putting everything into ~/texmf/, then ran "texexec --make --all" to remake the formats. (Everything else tex-related is from the Debian 'unstable' texlive 2007 packages.) texexec fails on this test file: \usetypescript[palatino][\defaultencoding] \setupbodyfont[palatino,11pt] \starttext \input tufte \stoptext with the following error: kpathsea: Running mktextfm ec-qplr /usr/share/texmf/web2c/mktexnam: Could not map typeface abbreviation c- for ec-qplr. /usr/share/texmf/web2c/mktexnam: Need to update /usr/share/texmf-texlive/fonts/map/fontname/special.map? mktextfm: Running mf-nowin -progname=mf \mode:=ljfour; mag:=1; nonstopmode; input ec-qplr This is METAFONT, Version 2.71828 (Web2C 7.5.6) kpathsea: Running mktexmf ec-qplr ! I can't find file `ec-qplr'. <*> ...=ljfour; mag:=1; nonstopmode; input ec-qplr It may be a Debian-specific problem (CC'ing Norbert for that reason), or maybe something strange on my laptop, but I've stayed as close to the vanilla Debian setup as possible. I thought I might need to update the latin modern fonts, but the Debian package is already v1.106, which looks like the latest version on the LM site. Does this latest context requires texlive 2008 (for newer map files or a newer pdftex)? -Sanjoy