[tex-live] XeLaTeX Not enough memory (part 2)

Karl Berry karl at freefriends.org
Mon May 24 02:37:01 CEST 2010


    - How can one configure in TeX Live the order of inclusion of font 
    types? E.g. firstly use typ1, secondly user ttf, ... etc.

There is no general mechanism for ordering search of font types across
programs.  I don't know if XeTeX has some specific way to control it.  I
don't recall ever seeing such a thing.  But since you are making a huge
font catalogue it is not surprising to me that it takes a huge amount of
memory.

    - Do I abuse fontspec in anyway for XeLaTeX to require so much memory or 
    is fontspec not optimised in this regard?

I hope someone who knows about fontspec will answer.

    - Could once again the default value of fonts_mem_size be doubled?

The default value of font_mem_size is 3,000,000 and I don't especially
want to hugely increase it, since that memory is malloc-ed at startup as
far as I can tell.

However, the hard limit is defined by sup_font_mem_size in tex.ch.  I
increased that from 4,000,000 to 147,483,647, so you can change
font_mem_size in texmf.cnf yourself and remake your format.

I trust someone will correct me if I'm wrong -- it appears to me that
font_mem_size is simply an integer, so 2^31-1 should be the actual
maximum (on 32-bit architectures).  That would have been 2,147,483,647,
but I just didn't want to go that far, so I lopped off the 2 :).

    Why is this limited anyway?

Because nearly everything in TeX & derivatives (except for LuaTeX) is
allocated as a static limit.  That's how Knuth wrote it, and making them
dynamically increasable is not simple.

Perhaps you should consider making your font catalogue using LuaTeX.  (At
least, I think Taco has eradicated most of these hard limits by now?)

k


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