I think you may miss something when you reading the web page about setups in context. now you can do following steps: first, edit tex/context/base/font-uni.tex, comment out the following line: \defineucharmapping{GBK}#1#2% {\unicodeposition=#1 \advance\unicodeposition -129 \multiply\unicodeposition 190 \advance\unicodeposition #2 \advance\unicodeposition-\ifnum#2>127 65\else64\fi \dorepositionunicode}
Or you can add these code to your cont-usr.tex.
Then when you write tex files, add \def\currentucharmapping{GBK} before you using chinese. Or conveniently, put this command to your cont-usr.tex too.
Actually I already put both of these into cont-usr.tex and it had no effect. But when I put these directly into my sample document it helped. It must be something about my set-up which isn't reading my cont-usr.tex file either on format creation or at run-time. I will look into it. Anyway, with these in my document I then ran into one final problem, which I was able to solve myself - the font definitions in font-chi.tex were mapping to things like gbsong and gbhei, whereas the new generation utilities create tfms and encodings called gbksong and gbkhei (i.e. an extra 'k'). Replacing the references in font-chi.tex solved that problem and I am now able to typeset beautiful Simplified Chinese glyphs! (I'm not clear whether this should be classed as a bug in font-chi.tex, since you can also change the naming in the generation utilities.) Thanks for all your help so far, it's looking good. I'm sure I will have more queries from now on! Duncan