After continuing to look into this a bit, I noticed that a similar issue
involving the insertion of a blank page after a columnset environment has
been discussed on the mailing list in the thread "Blank page inserted when
text reaches column's end" (dated 08 Dec 2019). In that thread, a proposed
solution was to redefine the \page_grd_stop macro found in page-cst.mkiv as
follows:
```
\unprotect
\def\page_grd_stop{%
\endgraf % needed, else wrong vsize in one par case
\vfill % otherwise weird \placenotes[endnotes]
\page_grd_command_set_vsize % needed
\penalty\c_page_otr_eject_penalty
%\page_grd_command_flush_page
\page_otr_fill_and_eject_page
\page_grd_command_set_vsize % why here
\egroup
\page_otr_command_set_vsize
\page_otr_command_set_hsize
}
\protect
```
Unfortunately, this approach was found to have potential issues in that
thread, and it does not fix the problem with pagecolumns in my MWE. Are
pagecolumns commands aliased to pagegrid commands like columnset commands
are, or are they defined somewhere else? I checked page-col.mkiv, but it
seems to be too short to be the file that defines pagecolumns behavior.
Joey
On Sat, May 2, 2020 at 11:46 AM Joey McCollum
I recently found the pagecolumns manual ( http://www.pragma-ade.com/general/manuals/pagecolumns.pdf), and in several of the examples (including those for side floats and footnotes), the addition of a blank page after the end of the pagecolumns environment also seems to occur. So when the manual says, "We always start at a new page and end on a new one," does it mean that this is a feature of pagecolumns? And if so, is there any way to disable it? I have no problem with a page break after the end of the pagecolumns environment, but an empty page added after the break seems unnecessary. I checked for a wiki page on the \definepagecolumns command to get more information on its accepted inputs, but there doesn't appear to be a page for this command.
Joey
On Tue, Apr 28, 2020 at 1:40 PM Joey McCollum
wrote: I am typesetting a document using pagecolumns to ensure that my footnotes are set ragged-bottom in columns. I have observed some unexpected behavior whenever the last column on a page is left incomplete: a blank page is added at the end of the document. A minimal working example follows:
```
\starttext
\startpagecolumns[n=2]
\dorecurse{3}{\par\input zapf}
\stoppagecolumns
\stoptext ```
I typeset this using ConTeXt version 2020.03.10, as released with TeXLive 2020. Notably, if \dorecurse{3} is changed to \dorecurse{2} or \dorecurse{6} (so that the text ends in the first column of a page), then there is no problem. I have tried to fix this by specifying page=no in the \startpagecolumns arguments, but it did not change anything. Is there something else I am missing?
Thank you,
Joey