Hi Philipp, thank you for your reply.
(1) Columnsets cause less trouble than the ordinary ?\[start|stop]columns?; (2) you have to define the vskips prior to using them with ?\setupwhitespace? or ?\blank?.
that takes me a bit further. But columnsets seem to have one great disadvantage regarding my project (as far as i could figure out): you have to manually balance the columns. Thats not practical within a 1200-pages book with a lot of balanced breaks. Another problem (but that may result of my missing knowledge): I could not get the columns to fill the page (now the contrary problem than before). I've tried setupalign[line] before as well as inside the columnset without any effort. Example below. Looking into spac-ver.mkiv did not really enlighten me (but i sure have to take a deeper look). Thanks again, Achim \showframe \definecolumnset[two][n=2] \newskip\Hugeskip \Hugeskip = 1em plus 4em minus 4em %that should be enough stretchability \definevspacingamount[Huge][\Hugeskip][\Hugeskip] % for \blank \definewhitespacemethod[Notsohuge]{\ctxparskip.5\Hugeskip} % for \setupwhitespace \setupalign[line] %does not work \starttext \startcolumnset[two] \setupalign[line] %does not work also %\setupwhitespace[Notsohuge, flexible] no effect \setupwhitespace[Notsohuge] %\setupwhitespace[flexible] no effect \dorecurse{10}{\input knuth} \stopcolumnset \stoptext ----- Ende der weitergeleiteten Nachricht -----