Hi Sanjoy, Sorry for the late reply; I had to dig around in grph-inc.lua, and I'm a bit rusty at source-diving. Yep, that’s a problem all right. A bug, even: when you put `simple.1` in the same directory as the `.tex` file, it is correctly identified as MetaPost; when you put the exact same file in a subdirectory like `./fig`, you get the problem you describe. No clue why. Until Hans fixes this, you can force ConTeXt to treat a file as MetaPost, JPEG, etc. by passing the `method=` paramater to `\externalfigure`. For MetaPost, write `method=mps`; I don’t know why the MetaPost code is not `mp`. (Perhaps that could be made a synonym?) Complete example below. I hope this workaround helps? Good luck with your work! Cheers, Sietse % test.tex \setupexternalfigures[directory={fig}] \enabletrackers[graphics.locating] \starttext \externalfigure[simple.1][width=10cm, method=mps] \stoptext % fig/simple.1 %!PS %%BoundingBox: 0 0 29 29 %%HiResBoundingBox: 0 0 28.34645 28.34645 %%Creator: MetaPost 1.803 %%CreationDate: 2013.08.04:0841 %%Pages: 1 %%BeginProlog %%EndProlog %%Page: 1 1 0 0 0 setrgbcolor newpath 0 0 moveto 28.34645 0 lineto 28.34645 28.34645 lineto 0 28.34645 lineto closepath fill showpage %%EOF