Duncan Hothersall wrote:

I said:

...

Is there any workaround/fix?

I find that the addition of \dontleavehmode fixes it. Is this safe to use in general?

\starttext \section{Tufte} \dorecurse{4}{\input tufte \par} \section{Knuth} \dontleavehmode\index{knuth} \input knuth \par \stoptext

no, use \dontleavehmode instead if you see a tex file on the web and wonder why the spacing is messed up ... it's probably because of abundant use of \leavemode (recent versions of pdftex provide \quitvmode which is equivalent to \dontleavehmode; taco wrote that patch a while ago) Hans