Salvete, for my latest project (almost done, so I don't need the answer for this one, but possibly in the future) I have compilation times which were dominated by Metapost until I switched to using --nomp most of the time and --automp --runs=2 whenever I changed something that results in changes to the Metapost stuff. (I needed the --automp anyway, since to work around size limits in MetaPost I had to split the background into separate images, yet they had to influence one another via global variables -- increasing the memory limit to 80 MB made Metapost predictably freeze at unpredictable places in the run.) Now, my compile times are dominated by the mp to pdf conversion. Since pdf inclusion is fast (as expected), I'd like to use mptopdf once on each generated file and have ConTeXt include that. Should I redefine \insertMPfile to first look for the pdf or is there a more clever way? (Note that I do want the automatic inclusion, since I'm passing the dimensions of external figures etc. to metapost and use the result in a background layer and/or as frame backgrounds.) regards, Christopher Creutzig PS: I didn't have time to analyze this when I came across it, but it seems that "texexec --automp file" consistently performs one TeX run too little. In any case, the last thing it does is a metapost run, which doesn't seem sensible to me.