Okay. Problem solved. The thing is that I did not ask the texlive distribution to install the extra fonts package. The palatino fonts were part of the extra fonts. Now I have another question. It seems like \setupbodyfont[palatino] produces different results than \setupbodyfont[ppl]. The former tries to use palatino in all the variations in the following example. The palatino fonts seems to be missing the serif variant, so the \ss and the normal lines look the same---i.e ConTeXt decided to use the same roman variant for both the \rm and the \ss line. Even the equation uses some sort of postscript font that I am not familiar with. The latter---\setupbodyfont[ppl]---is not very forceful---it uses palatino in the \rm, \em, and \sl lines. Everywhere else the CMR font is used. What causes this behavior? \usetypescript[berry][ec] % or [8r] \usetypescript[palatino][ec] % \setupbodyfont[palatino] %\setupbodyfont[ppl] \starttext {\rm The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. 1234567890} {\em The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. 1234567890} {\sl The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. 1234567890} {\ss The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. 1234567890} {\bf The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. 1234567890} {\tt The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. 1234567890} $$1+\sqrt{x^2}+\sum dx$$ \stoptext