On 2014-04-03 13:16, Stéphane Goujet wrote:

Le Thu, 03 Apr 2014 16:19:18 +0200,
Hans Hagen <pragma@wxs.nl> a écrit :

you probably didn't test with the beta because most looks ok

  Dammit, you are right. And yet I was using fairly recent versions
(25/03 and 27/03).

with respect to text: you need to go narrower or set the distance to 
(e.g.) -1cm

  It seems I can indeed get nice results with

\setuplinenumbering[location=text]
\startnarrower[left]
\startlinenumbering

  Thanks !

i've added support for notes (somewhat tricky)

\starttext
Here we have a footnote \footnote{%
     \startlinenumbering
         \input tufte

 A few numbers : 012345679.

         \par % somehow needed
     \stoplinenumbering
}
\stoptext

  Thank you again. To annoy you one more time, still one thing : the
font size of the line numbers is the one of the main text, no the
smaller one that numbers should have in the footnote part (just add a
few numbers in the footnote text to compare easily).

As to the size in footnotes, try:

\definelinenumbering[fntext]\setuplinenumbering[fntext][style=\ssxx]

or similar.

However, for the general case, there is still an issue with linenumbering that begins after the beginning of a paragraph. The work-around of \startnarrower cannot help in this case, since it appears to always start a new paragraph. Thus, it cannot be used to reproduce the form of quotation we are trying to replicate (from Thomas Bowdler, The Family Shakespeare, 1807):