[tex-live] bug: misleading message "TeX capacity exceeded" in beamer

Zdenek Wagner zdenek.wagner at gmail.com
Sat Jul 21 17:55:27 CEST 2012


2012/7/18 Camilo La Rota <camilo.larota2 at gmail.com>:
> The following error message occurs:
>
> TeX capacity exceeded in beamer, sorry [hash size=5000]
>
> in beamer, when a \block statement lacks the name of the block,
> and that the block contains a list of items:
>
> \begin{block}
> \begin{itemize}
> \item ...
> \end{itemize}
> \end{block}
>
> LaTeX didn't figure out that the name of the block was not there and print
> this error message without giving any hint of what has really happened.

1. This is not a TeX Live issue

2. I do not know beamer but I assume that the code should be
\begin{block}{somename} and you complain that in your case LaTeX does
not complain that the name is missing. LaTeX cannot do that because
the name is present, the problem is that the name makes no sense. The
block name is \begin (as if you wrote \begin{block}{\begin}{itemize})
- read the TeXbook in order to understand ho TeX is interpreting the
input. Since \begin is a macro, it gets expanded. It looks for an
argument (the name of the environment) but it cannot find {itemize}
because it is expanded in the middle of interpretation of
\begin{block}. It therefore takes some other nonsense (possibly an
internal macro) as an environment name. There is no surprise that
memory is exhausted before LaTeX gets any chance to run other tests.


-- 
Zdeněk Wagner
http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz



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