On Tue, Apr 24, 2012 at 18:20, Marco
\definecharacterkerning [narrow] [factor=-.1]
\starttext
\setcharacterkerning [narrow] \input knuth
\stoptext
This did the trick - and -.1 was just enough to dense the text up but not into total mess (-.2 was definitely Far Too Much).
Watch out, this mechanism breaks ligatures.
Doesn't matter in this case, I'm not that good at them when doing this by hand (involves ink, steel nib and too many splotches). My kerning still sucks big time in hand calligraphy, ConTeXt does it better. :-D Besides, if I ever want to do this really properly, I'll have to define my own ligatures anyway, they had all kinds of weird abbreviations which depend on whether you write English, Latin or Swedish... Won't happen this round, the contents won't be in fully period style either, just in the "inspired by" range. Maybe for September. Thank you, this admirably solved that little problem! Mari