Am 26.10.2012 um 00:46 schrieb Marcin Borkowski :

Good evening,

I have something like this in my document:

\startalignment[middle] ... \stopalignment

\startitemize ... \stopitemize

and I want some (more) vertical space in between them. Adding a \blank[big] (and even a \blank[big,force]) didn't help. Interestingly, \leavevmode\blank[big] did. What is going on? What is the "canonical" way to achieve what I want to have?

Use a bigger value for the \blank because when you have two consecutive blanks (the one after \stopalignment and the one from \startitemize) the smaller value is ignored and tex uses only the bigger value. When you use \dontleavehmode it works because you switch to horizontal mode but the extra space of the normal line height and not your \blank value, the problem with this approach is also that you get the parskip before the itemize. Compare this \setupwhitespace[4cm] \starttext \showgrid \startalignment[middle] \input knuth \stopalignment \dontleavehmode \startitemize \startitem \input knuth \stopitem \stopitemize \stoptext with this \starttext \showgrid \startalignment[middle] \input knuth \stopalignment \blank[2*big] \startitemize \startitem \input knuth \stopitem \stopitemize \stoptext Wolfgang