Mathias Picker
first, thanks! This solved my problem 90%. BIG Thanks!!
good to hear, but usually the rest 10% are the most difficult ;-)
That's most of what I wanted!! Great. I'm still puzzling over how to change the width of the hbox to \textwidth+\marginwidth\margindistance, but for now I'm saved. Why do I want a wider hbox? I print white fonts on black background, so the left shifted \hbox with a width of (I assume) \textwidth looks different from what I wanted. But it works for now...
OK, just in case you run pdfetex (see the e in between pdf and tex ;-}) you can use the \dimexpr ( .... ) primitive: \def\MyHead#1#2% {\vbox {\localheadsetup \begstrut % is this really needed? \hbox {\hskip-\marginwidth\hskip-\margindistance \framed[width=\dimexpr(\marginwidth+\margindistance+\textwidth), align=right, %raggedright frame=off, offset=2pt, background=color, backgroundcolor=black, foregroundcolor=white, ]{% \ifheadnumbercontent{#1}\kern\numberheaddistance\fi #2}}}} %\showframe \starttext \setuphead[section][alternative=command,number=no,command=\MyHead,style=\bf] \section{some quick fox jump over very lazy dogs} \input tufte \stoptext If you don't use pdfetex, you might think of switching. Or you could do some calculation to achieve the same.
Have a nice week,
You, too. Patrick