I'm dealing with a 500 page book (if you give me your github username, I'll happily add you to the repo) and many of these problems emerge only at scale. (when I render individual chapters, there are no issues, but when rendering the whole book, the tables just have all sorts of formatting issues.) Here's a working example % engine=luajittex \startenvironment env_trap \enableregime[utf-8] \setupcolors[state=start] \setupreferencing[autofile=yes] \setupinteraction[state=start, color=blue, contrastcolor=blue, style={\tf}] \usemodule[simplefonts] \usemodule[database] % Enable hyperlinks \setuppapersize [A4][A4] \definepapersize[standing][A4][A4] \definepapersize[lying][A4,landscape][A4] \setuplayout [width=middle, backspace=.75in, cutspace=.75in, height=middle, topspace=.5in, bottomspace=.5in] \setupbodyfont[11pt] \setupwhitespace[none] \setupcaption[table][location=top] \setupcaptions[style={\tfx}, width=.9\textwidth,align=middle] \unprotect \appendtoks \setupbackgrounds[\v!page][\c!background=\makeupparameter\c!background] \to \t_page_makeup_every_setup \protect \defineseparatedlist[CSV] [separator={,}, quotechar={"}, left=\bTD,right=\eTD, first=\bTR,last=\eTR, before=\bTABLE,after=\eTABLE] \setupTABLE[c][each][align=flushleft,style={\tfx},width=fit] \setupTABLE[r][1][background=color,backgroundcolor=gray,style={\tf}] \setupTABLE[align=middle] \setuppagenumbering[alternative=doublesided] \stopenvironment \starttext \placetable[here][tab01]{Kazanlak site numbers, aggregate area and average area through through time}{ \setupTABLE[c][each][align=middle,style={\tfx},alignmentcharacter={.},aligncharacter=yes] \chardef\characteralignmentmode=2 \startCSV Period,NL,Chl,EBA,LBA,EIA,LIA,RM,LA,BYZ,MA,OTT Aggregate Area (ha),1.5,2.9,5.0,6.7,21.5,43.3,54.9,31.2,24.4,30.7,94.9 Site Count,3,6,10,7,23,38,23,19,15,21,15 Avg Area (ha),0.5,0.5,0.5,1.0,0.9,1.1,2.4,1.6,1.6,1.5,6.3 \stopCSV } \stoptext And I wasn't able to cause it to fail via a trivial 'making it a component' and calling it from a project.

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Message: 5 Date: Mon, 18 Apr 2016 22:11:28 +0200 From: Hans Hagen To: ntg-context@ntg.nl Subject: Re: [NTG-context] Table index is nil Message-ID: <57153F70.6050505@wxs.nl> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed

On 4/18/2016 3:59 AM, Brian Ballsun-Stanton wrote:

...

I'm getting (suddenly) an error: ...ext/tex/texmf-context/tex/context/base/mkiv/font-hsh.lua:124: table index is nil

And I have a bunch of tables:

\placetable[here][tab01]{Kazanlak site numbers, aggregate area and average area through through time}{

\setupTABLE[c][each][align=middle,style={\tfx},alignmentcharacter={.},aligncharacter=yes]

...

\chardef\characteralignmentmode=2 \startCSV Period,NL,Chl,EBA,LBA,EIA,LIA,RM,LA,BYZ,MA,OTT Aggregate Area (ha),1.5,2.9,5.0,6.7,21.5,43.3,54.9,31.2,24.4,30.7,94.9 Site Count,3,6,10,7,23,38,23,19,15,21,15 Avg Area (ha),0.5,0.5,0.5,1.0,0.9,1.1,2.4,1.6,1.6,1.5,6.3 \stopCSV }

The odd thing is that no other chapters of the book (all of which use the same environment, and many use the same table)

When I comment out the series of tables, the errors go away. I've just rerun first-setup.sh just out of paranoia. mtx-context | current version: 2016.04.17 11:56

i really need a small *working* example for this