From: cameron@symcom.math.uiuc.edu (Cameron Smith)
Subject: Big TeX's -- how hard are they to come by?
Organization: none
Date: Fri, 11 Sep 1992 04:23:13 GMT

Are there enough free Big TeX implementation available nowadays that
I can simply tell someone who's running out of memory to go get one?

I've written a sizable macro package that's now in beta testing
among half a dozen TeX and LaTeX users.  One of them uses TeX
on a PC and on an IBM mainframe; I believe his PC TeX is PC-TeX,
and I have no idea what implementation his mainframe TeX is.
At any rate, neither of his TeX's is a "big" TeX, and he has been
getting out-of-memory errors ("Tex capacity exceeded, sorry hash
size=3000") on both systems.  He has asked whether I can re-code
my macro package to use less memory so it will run on a non-BigTeX
implementation.

Now I've been using TeX and LaTeX for 7 years, but I've never
brought up TeX from scratch, and have skimmed the source for
TeX only lightly.  (Hell, it was over four years before I even
learned how to dump a new format file from IniTeX!)  I have heard
the term "Big TeX" many times, and I know that the TeX on my system
(a NeXT with the 2.1 OS) is supposed to be "Big".  (I don't run out
of memory using my macros -- nowhere near it -- in fact I've never
run out of memory any time when I couldn't trace it to a coding
error that resulted in an unbounded recursion.)  But I don't know
what that really means, and I don't have a clue what kinds of coding
techniques are hazardous to use on non-Big TeX's, or how I would
even begin re-structuring a huge and complex macro package to fit
the same functionality into less memory.  So I would rather sidestep
this person's request to "fix" my macros by simply pointing him at
a free, easy-to-install Big TeX for one or both of his systems.

So my question is: nowadays, with memory *so* much more plentiful
than it was when TeX was first designed, aren't non-Big TeX's
antiquated?  And are there sufficiently many Big TeX implementation
available that it's not unfair to tell someone who's running out of
memory that he should simply go get a bigger TeX?

Any information on this topic would be much appreciated.  Email is OK,
but this seems like a general-interest topic so it seems appropriate
to post.  Thanks in advance for any pointers.

--Cameron Smith
  cameron@symcom.math.uiuc.edu

P.S. The macro package that is being tested is a font management package
     that I've been working on for about 2 years.  I started work on
     YAFSS (Yet Another Font Selection Scheme) quite a while before
     NFSS was made compatible with plain TeX -- one of my main reasons
     for creating YAFSS was to have a font scheme that would work
     *identically* in both plain TeX and LaTeX, which YAFSS does
     (without the need to create a new format file for LaTeX!).
     I've been using YAFSS regularly for over a year now, for documents
     large and small -- including two books, several articles, and
     occasional pamphlets, newsletters, and other baubles.  I was
     reluctant to release it because I didn't want to seem to compete
     with NFSS, but now it's stable and I've documented it and prepared
     sample documents and style files that show how to use it and I figure
     why not let other people who might be interested in it judge for
     themselves whether they want to use it?  So as soon as I've gotten
     comments back from all beta-testers, and updated the documentation
     to include the information that answers the concerns the testers
     raised, I plan to release it.  I expect that to be in November or
     thereabouts. --CS