Thanks for your contributions. You are right in your remark about the path to images, Wolfgang. I was not using any \setupexternalfigure[location=default] instruction. With your formulations the figure is recovered without problem. Unfortunately the results of your rewrite of the macro are not so satisfactory. Surely it is more *ConTeXt*ual than mine but it fails to fulfill the main purpose of the exercice: it happily prints fleurons in blank pages, as running your tests with 6 lines demonstrates. In such a circumstance it should produce just two pages with six lines each, whereas it outputs 4 pages, the two additional ones containing only ornaments. Your suggestion, Bill, of using special decorative fonts will be a good source of artistic material for the construction of alphabetically based motives by artistically inclined future users of the code, as the elaboration of the motives rests completely in their hands. The ones provided are mere demonstration samples. Regards Fancisco