> Alan BRASLAU <mailto:alan.braslau@cea.fr>
> 12. Januar 2016 um 19:07
> Hello,
>
> Jean-Michel pointed out to me the following curiosity:
>
> \starttext
> \input tufte
> \startalignment[middle]
> \input ward
> \stopalignment
> \input tufte
> \stoptext
>
> The startalignment applies to the preceding text, too. Strange...
It’s a normal behaviour for TeX, the question is should \startalignment 
end the previous paragraph or not.
> I never noticed this before as I have the habit of coding
> \startalignment\stopalignment blocks set-off with leading and trailing
> blank lines for better readability. But such practice could lead to
> undesired results. Consider the following example:
>
> \setupwhitespace [big]
>
> \starttext
> \input tufte
>
> \startalignment[middle]
> \input ward
> \stopalignment
> \input dawkins
> \stoptext
>
> So \stopalignment implicitly imposes a \par.
> If I were to omit the blank line before \startalignment so that no big
> whitespace be included before the centered block, the tufte text will
> get middle aligned. Also, perhaps I might not wish for the dawkins text
> to be separated by a big whitespace, logically as in:
You can use \startpacked … \stoppacked to suppress blank lines inserted 
by \setupwhitespace.

Wolfgang