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From: bxi@po.CWRU.Edu (Bruce Ikenaga)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: emTeX - btex: bizarre VM error
Message-ID: <1991May4.014635.18771@usenet.ins.cwru.edu>
Date: 4 May 91 01:46:35 GMT
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Reply-To: bxi@po.CWRU.Edu (Bruce Ikenaga)
Organization: Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH (USA)
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   I've gotten strange errors trying to run btex (from the emTeX
distribution). The date on the EXE file is 8-5-90.

   If I btex this:

      This file has nothing in it.
      \end

it works okay. If I try

      \input amstex.tex
      This file has nothing in it.
      \end

I get

      This is emTeX, Version 3.0 [3a] (no format preloaded)
      **nothing
      (nothing.tex (c:\emtex\texinput\amstex.tex

      AmS-TeX - Version 2.0

      COPYRIGHT 1985, 1990 - AMERICAN MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY
      Use of this macro package is not restricted provided
      each use is acknowledged upon publication.


      *** VM: cannot write to temporary file.

Amusingly enough, if I *now* run the *first* nothing.tex through
btex, it immediately halts with the VM error! And if I run the
second nothing.tex, the AMS logo never appears --- just the VM
error message. How can things change if they stay the same? :-)

   All of this is cleared if I reboot.

   The ordinary (small) tex.exe works fine.

   I'm running this on an AT clone (286), 2 megs of RAM, Paradise
VGA. There is at least 6 megs free on drive c:, and all the
environment variables relevant to tex.exe are the defaults. Drivers
are ansi.sys, mouse.sys, himem.sys, ramdrive.sys; ced and the
Logitech menu driver are also loaded, but the problems still occur
if I unload them. All of this is running under DOS 3.3.

   An unrelated question: Why does AMS-TeX manage to exceed the
capacity of every "normal" TeX I've ever used? It does this with
the (ordinary) PC-TeX, and it does this with the ordinary tex.exe
in the emTeX distribution. I guess this wouldn't be a problem with
UNIX TeXs, but geez ... Is this just a *big* macro package, or am
I doing something wrong?

   Thanks in advance for any help.
-- 
Bruce Ikenaga
---------------------------------------------------
US mail: Dept. of Math, CWRU, Cleveland, Ohio 44106
E-mail : bxi@po.CWRU.edu