Runtime options

Besides the configure- and compile-time options described in the previous sections, you can control a number of parameters (in particular, array sizes) in the `texmf.cnf' runtime file read by Kpathsea (see section `Config files' in Kpathsea).

Rather than exhaustively listing them here, please see the last section of the distributed `kpathsea/texmf.cnf'. Some of the more interesting values:

`main_memory'

Total words of memory available, for TeX, Metafont, and MetaPost. Must remake the format file after changing.

`extra_mem_bot'

Extra space for "large" TeX data structures: boxes, glue, breakpoints, et al. If you use PiCTeX, you may well want to set this.

`font_mem_size'

Words of font info available for TeX; this is approximately the total size of all TFM files read.

`hash_extra'

Additional space for the hash table of control sequence names. Approximately 10,000 control sequences can be stored in the main hash table; if you have a large book with numerous cross-references, this might not be enough, and thus you will want to set hash_extra.

Of course, ideally all arrays would be dynamically expanded as necessary, so the only limiting factor would be the amount of swap space available. Unfortunately, implementing this is extremely difficult, as the fixed size of arrays is assumed in many places throughout the source code. These runtime limits are a practical compromise between the compile-time limits in previous versions, and truly dynamic arrays. (On the other hand, the Web2c BibTeX implementation does do dynamic reallocation of some arrays.)

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