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From: mackay@CS.WASHINGTON.EDU (Pierre MacKay)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: How do you increase font memory?
Message-ID: <9103070041.AA24041@june.cs.washington.edu>
Date: 7 Mar 91 00:41:54 GMT
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WEB is by its nature a pascal programming system.  If you run tangle
normally, and not in the special Web2C environment, what you get is the
"pascal brick", a close-packed, unformatted lot of pascal source.
 
What UnixTeX used to do was use the Berkeley Unix pxp to reformat, since
this also provided the substitute for a default case.  We gave that
up because of the array limitations in Berkeley pascal, and have been
urging the use of BIG TeX ever since.
 
If the change files for VMS do not allow increase in memory, that is either
because the compiler would not honor the increase or because no one
has got around to it.  The data specifications within the WEB system allow
you to declare that a "half-word" is any arbitrary size, so long as you
can make your compiler understand.  Nothing like WEB2PAS is necessary.
Tangle creates the pascal file with the merged increases as supplied by
the change file.
 
But if the compiler is strait-jacketed to 16-bit array addressing, there is
little that tangle can do for you.  (It requires a lot of work, but pointers
can be substituted for array references.  I participated in an successful
operation on MS-DOS where that was done some time ago.)
 
 
Email concerned with UnixTeX distribution software should be sent primarily
to:     elisabet@max.u.washington.edu           Elizabeth Tachikawa
otherwise to:  mackay@cs.washington.edu         Pierre A. MacKay
Smail:  Northwest Computing Support Center      TUG Site Coordinator for
        Thomson Hall, Mail Stop DR-10           Unix-flavored TeX
        University of Washington
        Seattle, WA 98195
        (206) 543-6259