On Wed, Dec 19, 2012 at 9:38 PM, Guy Stalnaker
I'm willing to give you an image, but it cannot be the images. I have edited the file and put systematically % before the /externalfigure lines then run context against the file. As I added the % the nil error shifted to the next /externalfigure. I stopped this after five times. I have confirmed, by the way, file/directory ownership with chown and privileges with chmod. They are set as they should be, so whatever is awry is not owner/privilege related.
Another reason it cannot be the images is that I used context with the same document and the same images to successfully create a document. They were unchanged, to my knowledge, the next day when context started throwing the error. While it's conceivable that some agent might have modified the documents and/or my office Linux install overnight without my knowledge, that must be considered a very remote possibility.
That said, I'm hard-pressed to figure out what can possibly have changed, overnight, such that context would suddenly begin throwing the errors. That is why I unlinked/relinked Dropbox. They could change something on their end. But that had no affect on the error. Nor did moving all the images that are in the document from multiple directories into one directory.
I think Wolfgang may be correct that I should remove/purge my context installation. But I have to say that is not an encouraging course of action. It's also possible to install a parallel context: i.e. if you have context in /opt/context/standalone-01122012 you can install a fresh context (with first-setup.sh , I mean) in /opt/context/standalone-20122012 copy here your files and check if they fail.
-- luigi