Am 23.06.2025 um 17:25 schrieb John Was:
Thanks for that Hraban.
I guess after more than 30 years of typesetting academic books and journals in plain TeX (of whatever variety) it's hard not to think in plain TeX terms, but I will acquire more expertise in ConTexT as time goes by.
1. it's written ConTeXt (but nobody cares when you write Context). 2. A layout it simple when you don't try to whatever key you can find in the manual and hope to get something acceptable as a result. The following example shows the basic steps for a custom layout (the initial \setuplayout is only for the example to start with a full page).
I appreciate, of course, that the nano-setting of the height parameter is never going to be the way forward, but this started when I noticed that a very slight alteration (of a few points) made the difference between 39 and 41 lines on the first full page of text, while no whole number resulted in 40 lines - hence the repeated addition of tiny amounts to see if the magic value would emerge that simply sets 40 lines of 12pt text on every page. Nothing so far has allowed this to happen.
When you have a fixed number of lines you have to set the interlinespace to a fixed value because by default Context uses a font dependant distance, e.g. \setupinterlinespace[line=15pt] can help. Wolfgang