On 2/9/2025 5:16 AM, Michal Hoftich wrote:
Hi Nasser,
On Sun, Feb 9, 2025 at 6:33 AM Nasser M. Abbasi <n...@12000.org> wrote:
At this day of 100's of GB memory and multi terabytes of disk storage,
I was wondering how hard it is to finally fix this limitation
of DVI with tex4ht so it can handle much larger DVI pages?
It seems 65536 pages limit is something in the 1980's might
be required, but still in 2025? And why is there a limit
in the first place? Can not DVI file just grow in size as needed?
The number of pages is saved as two bytes in the DVI file header. This
means that there is this limit of 65536 pages that cannot be changed
without breaking of backwards compatibility, so it is unlikely to happen.
Could not the default remain 65536 pages, but have some user configuration
parameter they can change? This way there is no backwards compatibility
issues. right?
Is it just a matter of changing some hardcoded number
in tex4ht source code somewhere? I will be happy to help in anyway
myself, but I have to idea how tex4ht works from the inside.
This is the limit of TeX, we cannot change it from the inside of TeX4ht.
But you can use larger page sizes to work around this issue. Like paper
height of 575 cm:
\usepackage[paperwidth=100cm, paperheight=575cm]{geometry}
This is the maximal size before I get dimension too large error.
Do you mean this something I need to do just when
compiling to HTML? or will also be applied to PDF generation?
i.e. can I wrap the above inside \ifdefined\HCode? If so,
then I will definitely try it.
But I can't have my PDF file be that size. I have to keep it
letter size. But if only for tex4ht, I can try it.
Not sure if this is what you meant.
I hope this workaround doesn' cause other issues,
Best,
Michal
Thanks. It will be better if tex4ht can support large web pages one day.
After all, the web is supposed to be the future :)
When I asked about this about 2 years ago, Karl said
https://tug.org/pipermail/tex4ht/2023q4/003515.html
"it should be possible to remove the 2^16 page limit in tex4ht.
Sure, most likely it is possible. And if you want to rearrange the logic
in tex4ht-c.tex / tex4ht.c so it doesn't use the stated postamble value,
patches are welcome :). As I said, it's just not something I think is
crucial enough to spend time on."
I looked at tex4ht-c.tex but it is over my head what needs to change.
--Nasser
