columns issues

[Henning Hraban Ramm <hraban@fiee.net>]

Hello wizards!

The \startcolumns ... \column ... \stopcolumns block handling seems  
somewhat broken.
Maybe these "old" columns are deprecated, but I guess they should  
work. (And I would like to document them.)
Consider this:

\starttext

\input ward

\startcolumns
\input ward

\column

\input knuth
\stopcolumns

\input tufte

\stoptext

In this case \column works (it doesn't seem to work always), so that  
the left column is much shorter than the right one.
But the following paragraph (tufte) is typeset just after the last  
line of the left column, so that some lines overprint.

And with [rule=on] the rule is only as short as the left column.  
[option=background] also only considers the leftmost (or first in  
[direction=left]) column.

Maybe this behaviour is sometimes useful, but I don't think it should  
be default.

[balance=no] doesn't affect the balancing of columns, but flushes the  
page (i.e. the tufte paragraph moves to the next page). With [n=3]  
you see that it doesn't use the whole remaining page.

The whole problem seems to be \column, because without that, everthing 
(?) works.

I didn't find out what the options ntop, blank, height and align are  
for; I tried several values and nothing seemed to change.

[The source is http://source.contextgarden.net/page-mul.tex
but I don't understand too much of it.]

After looking in the manual, I guess I should consider using  
paragraphs or columns sets for most of my use cases, but anyway...

Grüßlis vom Hraban!
---
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