Alan BRASLAU
12. Januar 2016 um 19:07
Hello,

Jean-Michel pointed out to me the following curiosity:

\starttext
\input tufte
\startalignment[middle]
\input ward
\stopalignment
\input tufte
\stoptext

The startalignment applies to the preceding text, too. Strange...
It’s a normal behaviour for TeX, the question is should \startalignment end the previous paragraph or not.
I never noticed this before as I have the habit of coding
\startalignment\stopalignment blocks set-off with leading and trailing
blank lines for better readability. But such practice could lead to
undesired results. Consider the following example:

\setupwhitespace [big]

\starttext
\input tufte

\startalignment[middle]
\input ward
\stopalignment
\input dawkins
\stoptext

So \stopalignment implicitly imposes a \par.
If I were to omit the blank line before \startalignment so that no big
whitespace be included before the centered block, the tufte text will
get middle aligned. Also, perhaps I might not wish for the dawkins text
to be separated by a big whitespace, logically as in:
You can use \startpacked … \stoppacked to suppress blank lines inserted by \setupwhitespace.

Wolfgang