The answer from a SE question has provided a little light: http://tex.stackexchange.com/q/274582/2148 Directories listed in OSFONTDIR are not recursively scanned for font files. That's a bit inconvenient. I borrowed from the answer in that question to do the following: rm -rf $HOME/.fonts mkdir $HOME/.fonts cd $HOME/.fonts for i in $(echo $OSFONTDIR | sed -e 's/:/ /g') ; do for j in $(find $i -type f); do ln -s $j .; done; done The last line creates a symbolic link to every font file specified by OSFONTDIR. This is means that adding new fonts requires re-linking them to $HOME/.fonts. After that, I set OSFONTDIR as follows in $HOME/.bashrc: OSFONTDIR=$HOME/.fonts Then: mtxrun --script fonts --reload After that, ConTeXT produced the PDF for the MWE at the start of this thread. How can OSFONTDIR be recursed again? FWIW, I tried: OSFONTDIR=/usr/share/fonts//:/usr/local/share/fonts//:/usr/share/texmf/fonts/opentype//:/usr/share/fonts/type1/gsfonts// That didn't work, either.