Thanks Aditya, I tried your suggestion, but the result is the same. Here's the XML setup for all images in the document: \startxmlsetups xml:img \starttexcode \placefloat[here,force]{}{% \hbox{\externalfigure[\xmlatt{#1}{src}][conversion=mp]} } \stoptexcode \stopxmlsetups Here's the Markdown source document:  The source document is automatically exported as XHTML: <p> <img alt="" src="/path/to/images/dna-02.svg"/> </p> The XHTML is then passed to ConTeXt, whereupon the XML setup for images is applied. The result is the same: the alignment for the text is off. Here's an example where you can see the issue on the 16q24.3 text (far right): https://i.ibb.co/WGh03Sr/genes.png When the same SVG file is rendered using Apache Batik, the white text is aligned to the middle of the black box. Are there aAny other work-arounds? Thank you!