Hans van der Meer schrieb am 15.05.2019 um 09:24:

I find that the current (default) settings tend to break pages early, leaving a fairly large amount of whitespace at the bottom of the pages. Obviously in order to avoid breaking paragraphs or to avoid small parts of a paragraph at the top of the page.

What parameters do I have to tweak to fill the pages more completely? Because I planned already to examine all pages individually for their appearance, inserting breaks by hand is not the problem here.

You have to change the penalty values for orphans, widows etc. \startsetups [hvdm]   \directsetup{*reset}   \nopenalties \stopsetups \showgrid \starttext \dorecurse{10}{\samplefile{knuth}} \page \setuplayout[setups=hvdm] \dorecurse{10}{\samplefile{knuth}} \stoptext Wolfgang