context --make does a --generate so you can skip that and the luatools run is not needed either (selfupdate is seldom needed too)
So 'context --make' is all one needs? I'll update the wiki.
we get a .5pt height difference somewhere (nothing else different in a trace) ... smells like a luatex bug (testing that now)
That is my suspicion as well. But I couldn't reproduce it with plain luatex. Though maybe I needed to use equation numbers, however that is done in plain tex (the context run doesn't show the problem without the \placeformula). I suspect some internal state is getting slightly corrupted and getting progressively worse with the 30,000 repetitions. I've been finding many unexplained 0.5pt or so differences, which may be related to the underbrace problem. The context, so to speak, is that I am putting in the last edits to the book, after having gone through and checked every page many times. So I want to ensure that none of the small changes has a big effect, but I don't want to check every page again (or I'll vomit). Thus, I run my compare-pdfs.sh script on the previous and the latest pdf. It renders each page to a B/W png (using mupdf) and then compares corresponding pages using 'compare' (one of the ImageMagick tools). Any differing pixels are in red, and the shared pixels are in very light gray. Then all the pages with enough differences are viewed with 'feh', in order of most-to-least differences. And I check that nothing major has changed. What I keep finding is that pages long after where I make a small change somehow get changed, with roughly one-pixel shifts to parts of the page. I'm attaching an example pixel diff. It shows changes on p.72 of the mss. However, the only change to the source code was on p.58 (and was designed not to change any page breaks, which it didn't). That same page (p.72) often gets similar changes with all kinds of small changes. [Note to me: In case I need to recreate the source for debugging purposes, it's the change from rev 41ff54 to 2467d5] In case the script is useful to others (earlier versions are in the contexttest repository somewhere), I am attaching it. I use it as follows with a bash command line. (The awk in the pipeline makes sure that only pages with some difference make it to the viewer.) DPI=72 compare-pdfs.sh old.pdf new.pdf | tee book-print.compare72dpi | awk '{if (($3 > 0.02)) print;}' | sort -nr -k3 | awk '{print $1}' | xargs -r feh -Sanjoy
