[tex-live] xdvipdfmx says "** ERROR ** Capacity exceeded"

Daniel Rubin drubin at dimedis.de
Fri Feb 19 09:47:23 CET 2010


Jin-Hwan Cho wrote:
> On Feb 18, 2010, at 10:12 PM, Daniel Rubin wrote:
> 
>> Dear tex-live users and wizards,
>>
>> I've got a problem with xdvipdfmx trying to build a PDF from an xdvi
>> file compiled with xelatex.
>>
>> The logfile is empty except for this:
>>
>> <FONTMAP:cm-dvipdfm-fix.map><FONTMAP:dvipdfm.map><FONTMAP:cid-x.map>
>> ** WARNING ** DVI need stack depth of 291,
>> ** WARNING ** but DVI_STACK_DEPTH_MAX is 256.
>> ** ERROR ** Capacity exceeded.
>>
>> I have no clue as to what's causing this.  It happens with about 1 out
>> of 1000 source files I'm creating.  I'd be glad to get some help to
>> pinpoint this.
>>
>> What stack is this DVI stack?
> 
> It is easy to understand if you are familiar with DVI commands, push and pop.

Well, I'm not.  ;-)

In fact I have no idea about the structure of DVI files at all, but I'm
willing to learn.


> The "push" command will save a few values related to the current status and
> increase the "stack depth" value. On the other hand, the "pop" command will
> restore the saved values, and decrease the "stack depth".
> 
> DVI_STACK_DEPTH_MAX says how many "push"es you can use.

All right, so it's a stack for any sort of data.


>> What may be causing it to become so deep? E. g. can I do something to my
>> latex-source, embedded images, fonts or whatever to make this go away?
> 
> I never see a valid TeX file causing the dvi stack problem. One exception is
> when some style or class files may have a bug. If you send me sample ".xdv"
> file, I can check what happened really. (It may be helpful if I have a source
> TeX file too.)

There's a problem there, I'm afraid.  The failing xdv files all contain
some customer's personal data, so I cannot provide them, sorry.  I have
not been able to reproduce the problem in a simple test case, at least
not yet.  I hope that the help I'm getting from you and others leads me
closer to what's actually causing the problem.

Somebody else suggested the issue might be related to nested boxes.  As
I do have quite a lot of those, I'm hopeful that this might be the right
track.  What do you think?


>> I'm creating through an automated process and I'm afraid simply going to
>> the source and increasing the limit will only make this problem go away
>> for a little longer rather than forever.
> 
> If you are able to compile "xdvipdfmx" by yourself, it is very simple to adjust
> the maximum value of DVI_STACK_DEPTH_MAX. Find the 70th line of the
> "dvi.c", and change the value 256 to what you want.

Yes, I have successfully built texlive 2008 from sources yesterday
evening, but it's not quite behaving like the binary distribution yet.

I'll investigate and let you know if setting DVI_STACK_DEPTH_MAX to 4096
made the issue go away.  If it did not I think I can be sure there's a
problem with my LaTeX code.

> Best regards, ChoF.

Thanks a lot,
have fun
----Daniel


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