as advised I have installed standalone context in order to get better support of system fonts under macosx. I now have had the following happen to me: 1. after installation of `standalone' and straightening out unrelated problems with `\usemodule' usage I managed to get proper support of -- that's the specific font I wanted to use -- the `Optima' font family. Notably I got italics where I wanted them. so far so good. 2. then I discovered that standalone context does not include the very nice `EB Garamond' font (although there are some files in the context tree apparently related to tweaking some things related to this font) -- contrary to texlive where `context` finds this font just fine. 3. instead of putting this font into the standalone `context' tree (which I tried initially without luck -- on second thought I probably would have needed to do a `mtxrun --script fonts --reload' ...) I installed these (otf) fonts systemwide. (as an aside: is there a way of notifying standalone context of the location of the `texlive' font directories?) 4. contrary to what I seem to have read in the documentation somewhere (??) the fonts were than _not_ looked up "on demand" (i.e. where not found automatically when compiling the document wanting to use this font) but only found after I did a manual `mtxrun --script fonts --reload' 5. now `ebgaramond' works fine _but_ out of the `Optima' fonts now only the regular font is found and reported by `mtxrun ... fonts` if I interpret this output correctly: optima optimaregular /System/Library/Fonts/Optima.ttc index: 4 optimanormal optimaregular /System/Library/Fonts/Optima.ttc index: 4 optimaregular optimaregular /System/Library/Fonts/Optima.ttc index: 4 so I seem back to square one in this respect :-(. I can only assume that this has been caused by the `--reload' run (see item 1. above: intitially `optima' italics worked) and/or maybe still fragile support of these `ttc' (true type collection) files? just a guess. what am I doing wrong _this_ time? thx, joerg -- Using Opera's revolutionary email client: http://www.opera.com/mail/