Am 23.12.2014 um 23:32 schrieb j. van den hoff <veedeehjay@googlemail.com>:

thanks to both of you. in fact, just doing `mtxrun —script font —reload —force'
restored sane behaviour (italics back again etc.).

so, I understand that _this_ actually rebuilds the font data base? what, then, is just issuing `—reload’ good for?

When you make a new installation and context runs for the first time
it make a scan for all available fonts and store some information about
each font but this will take some time (although this is now faster than
it has been in the past).

To add a new font to this list you can use "mtxrun —script font —reload“
which adds only new fonts to the list which is faster than a complete
rebuild of the list which is done with the "force“ option.

Wolfgang