On Mon, 30 Aug 2010, Mojca Miklavec wrote:

> On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 19:23, Aditya Mahajan wrote:
>> On Mon, 30 Aug 2010, Mojca Miklavec wrote:
>>
>>> I'm trying to find the command (in manual, wiki or mailing list) that
>>> enables using background behind text spanning over multiple pages.
>>
>> Hey, you are getting rusty :-)
>
> I am. In past I used to spend much longer solving ConTeXt-related
> issues than writing reports which turned out to be a very bad strategy
> for the sake of writing speed. On top of that, I didn't manage to
> follow the MKIV development anywhere closely ... and this is
> definitely one of areas where much more is possible in MKIV than it
> used to be possible in MKII.

I will believe that you are writing something when I see your thesis :-) I 
have heard rumours that it exists.

>>> At the moment I have
>>>
>>> \startframedtext
>>>  [width=\textwidth,
>>>  background=color,
>>>  backgroundcolor=mycolor1,
>>>  frame=off,
>>>  leftframe=on,
>>>  framecolor=mycolor2]
>>>
>>> but I remember that there used to be a command that allowed doing the
>>> same, but spanning the text over multiple pages.
>>
>> backgrounds and textbackgrounds. IIRC, they are documented in the details
>> manual.
>
> Oh, sure, thanks a lot. However ... \definetextbackground doesn't seem
> to support leftframe=on. That means that I need to use metapost to
> draw it ... (or just continue searching) ... or even better ... ignore
> my idea to draw the left frame and just continue writing ...

Drawing a left frame using a metapost shouldn't be too hard.

draw leftboundary OverlayBox withpen pencircle scaled 1bp withcolor red ;

(or something like that).

Aditya