Steffen Wolfrum wrote:

Thanks for the quick answer - but obviously my example was bad: columnsetareas don't do what I need.

Maybe this is a better explanation:

Given you have two articles in a book set in two columns. The second article doesn't start on a new page - it just begins where the first one ends.

But the first article (aaa...) ends with two balanced columns, then comes the heading (bbb) for the second article, and then comes begins the second article (ccc...).

That's what I mean by

aaa aaa aaa aaa

bbbb

ccc ccc ccc ccc

Do you have a trick how to do a page like this with columnsets?

well, it involves some manual tweaking (numbers and such) and is not yet 100% ok the next code shows a bit of balancing and columnstart/height manipulations \starttext \showgrid \definecolumnset [two] [n=2,balance=top] \definecolumnset [three] [n=3,balance=top] \setupcolumnsetlines[two][1][1][15] \setupcolumnsetlines[two][1][2][15] \setupcolumnsetstart[three][1][1][15] \setupcolumnsetstart[three][1][2][18] \setupcolumnsetstart[three][1][3][20] \setupcolumnsetlines[three][1][1][40] \setupcolumnsetlines[three][1][2][40] \setupcolumnsetlines[three][1][3][40] \definecolumnsetspan[two] % \starttext % \startcolumnset [two] \dorecurse {1}{\input tufte \par} \stopcolumnset % \startcolumnset [three] \dorecurse {2}{\input tufte \par} \stopcolumnset % \stoptext \starttext \startcolumnset [two] \startcolumnsetspan[two] \input ward \stopcolumnsetspan \dorecurse {1}{\input tufte \par} \stopcolumnset \startcolumnset [three] \startcolumnsetspan[two] \input ward \stopcolumnsetspan \dorecurse {2}{\input tufte \par} \stopcolumnset \stoptext \stoptext ----------------------------------------------------------------- Hans Hagen | PRAGMA ADE Ridderstraat 27 | 8061 GH Hasselt | The Netherlands tel: 038 477 53 69 | fax: 038 477 53 74 | www.pragma-ade.com | www.pragma-pod.nl -----------------------------------------------------------------