Dear Marco,

...

I'd like to type two blocks of text with different 'align' settings side by side.

Here's one way to do it:

\setupframed [offset=1ex, width=8cm, frame=off]

\starttext \placesidebyside {\startframed[align={normal,left}] \input knuth\par\stopframed} {\startframed[align={normal,right}] \input knuth\par\stopframed} \stoptext

Marco

thanks for this. I removed that framed=off option and it turned out to be sligthly different from what I'd like to achieve. My goal is to have two blocks with a vertical gap between them and to have these blocks framed (or with the colored background) at the text area - without the cell spans - to show differences between the standard and 'hanging' alignments (that right border should cross the punctuation in the hanging mode). Below each 'column' I'd like to place a short description (centered) - exactly as on the referenced examples. Jan