Hello Oliver, Thank you very much. You encouraged me to do some more tests and finally I discovered something useful. The cow.pdf from context examples runs smoothly. My .pdf was saved in Adobe Acrobat 8 Pro and this turns out the main cause. Saving with older versions compatibility and adjusting other settings don't help also. Anything created in this Acrobat fails in XeTeX. And good news: pdf created in Inkscape seems to be valid input for XeTeX! -- Best regards, Vyatcheslav Yatskovsky

Well, first try inserting the sample PDF file "cow.pdf" supplied with ConTeXt via

\placefigure{Test}{\externalfigure[cow]}

Contrary to including the familiar text snippets (like tufte, ward etc.) you can't use cow.pdf directly from its original place in the ConTeXt tree but you'll need to copy it into your working directory. (You may have to download cont-img.zip from www.pragma-ade.com first in order to find the sample images at all).

With ImageMagick installed (and write18 activated) XeTeX should now generate an auxiliary file cow.pdf.rli when processing your TeX source and include the figure flawlessly.

Let me know if this works.

Oliver

P.S. Dealing with your own PDF files would be the next step but I'm currently trying to track down a nasty distortion issue and I haven't quite figured out yet whether this is caused by a malformed PDF image or by ConTeXt. However, the file cow.pdf appears to be harmless in this respect, hence my advice to try this out first.