Re: [Groff] poll: which macro packages are in common use / and why.

[Werner LEMBERG]

> > Hmm, groff has an unlimited amount of string space. ...
> 
> Surely not.  Certainly it may not *explicitly* set such a limit, but
> it uses dynamic memory allocation, when creating the string objects.

I've meant that implicitly.
 
> Thus, groff's string space allocation must be satisfied from the
> process heap memory, which *does* have a limited size.  When too
> many strings are defined, then the available heap memory will be
> exhausted, resulting in the condition I have described as 'string
> space overflow'.

Aah, the error message then comes from the operating system and is
completely out of groff's control.  Honestly, I've never encountered
such a situation with any GNU/Linux program, given that I have
256MByte RAM and 512MByte swap space...

> I do not think I can demonstrate this with a *small* test case.
> However, if you examine pdfmark.ms, included in the preview tarball
> I posted earlier,

I haven't checked it, but there is a chance that it is no longer
possible to send attachments to the list since I haven't seen your
bundle.  Or is it too big?  Can you retry, appending an uuencoded,
compressed tarball?

> you will notice a cross reference commented out at line 1726;
> uncommenting this will produce the 'input stack limit exceeded'
> error in the final formatting pass (at least it does on both my
> GNU/Linux and Win2K boxes, but YMMV).

Will test it, thanks.


    Werner