Hello, Jean-Michel pointed out to me the following curiosity: \starttext \input tufte \startalignment[middle] \input ward \stopalignment \input tufte \stoptext The startalignment applies to the preceding text, too. Strange... I never noticed this before as I have the habit of coding \startalignment\stopalignment blocks set-off with leading and trailing blank lines for better readability. But such practice could lead to undesired results. Consider the following example: \setupwhitespace [big] \starttext \input tufte \startalignment[middle] \input ward \stopalignment \input dawkins \stoptext So \stopalignment implicitly imposes a \par. If I were to omit the blank line before \startalignment so that no big whitespace be included before the centered block, the tufte text will get middle aligned. Also, perhaps I might not wish for the dawkins text to be separated by a big whitespace, logically as in: \startparagraph \input tufte \startalignment [middle] \input ward \stopalignment \input dawkins \stopparagraph Indeed, curious behavior. Alan