Re: Uh-oh: documentation PDF output no longer builds in HEAD

On 2015-11-08 16:29:56 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> andres(at)anarazel(dot)de (Andres Freund) writes:
> > While taking pretty short of forever, postgres-US.pdf seems to build on
> > my debian unstable as of 8d7396e509 + some additional docs. Is this
> > dependant of what version of text you're using (plain tex, pdftex,
> > xetex, whatnot)?
>
> > postgres-US.log contains:
> > 360764 strings out of 481710
>
> Interesting. They must have boosted the strings limit from 2^18 to 2^19.
> According to what I've read, this is doable when compiling TeX from
> source, but we can hardly expect users (or packagers) to do that if their
> distribution hasn't built it that way. (The 2^18 limit I'm seeing is with
> RHEL6's tex package.

Debian uses pdflatex from texlive-base (2015.20151016-1). Maybe that's
the relevant difference.

> I'm currently downloading the Fedora rawhide package
> to see if it's any better, but man that is one large package...)

It indeed is. I've not found any relevant patches in debian's
package. Lots of changing paths and defaults, but afaics nothing else.

> BTW, I realized after poking around that the hack I put in back in 9.0
> probably only eliminates about 5000 strings from the pool, because
> it should save one string per \pagelabel entry added to the .aux
> file, and there are less than 5000 such entries after a successful
> build. So that was a good quick-n-dirty fix but it's really only
> scratching the surface of the problem: there are ~240000 other strings
> getting made somewhere. I wonder if a better answer is possible.

Debian's pdfjadetex package has the following comment in
README.jadetex.cfg:

> * Not Labelling Elements
>
> In some cases, it is possible for pdfjadetex to error out even with
> expanded texmf.cnf settings. The sign of this is that jadetex is able
> to process the file, but pdfjadetex isn't. The upstream maintainer,
> Sebastian Rahtz, had this to say:
>
> | pdfjadetex _can_ go over a string limit in TeX
> | which *isn't* changeable in texmf.cnf. The workaround is to write a
> | file called jadetex.cfg, containing just the line
> |
> | \LabelElementsfalse
> |
> | and see if that helps. it stops jadetex from using up a string for
> | every element. If that leaves unsatisfied cross-references, try
> | "jadetex" instead of "pdfjadetex", and create your PDF in
> | another via
> | (ie via Distiller).

Might be worthwhile to see wether \LabelElementsfalse makes a huge
difference.