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From: jwz@spice.cs.cmu.edu (Jamie Zawinski)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript
Subject: dictfull??
Message-ID: <4242@pt.cs.cmu.edu>
Date: 10 Feb 89 03:47:36 GMT
Organization: Carnegie-Mellon University, CS/RI
Lines: 30

I've written a document production system that generates PostScript.  The
PostScript that it produces is of the form

<x> <y> (<text>) word

where "word" is a procedure that moves to XY and drops the string in the
current font.  (Actually, it's more sophisticated than that, but you get the
general idea.)

Now, for large documents, I get the error "dictfull, flushing job", and I
have no idea what dictionary is filling up.  Even when a document contains a
large number of font changes, I am calling findfont/makefont/scalefont as
few times as possible - when I switch to a font for the first time, I stuff
the scaled font object into a variable, and when I want to switch to it
again, I use the object that I saved.  (This was not always the case - I
used to call findfont each time, but started caching in an attempt to fix
the dictfull error).

The function that drops words down on the page sets variables.  So the only
thing I can think of is that executing "/foo 0 def" over and over again
makes the dictionary grow - but that doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

Has anyone encountered anything like this?  Does anyone have any suggestions
as to how I can debug it?  Like, how can I tell exactly *which* dictionary
is filling up?  Maybe then I could write code to print the contents of the
dictionary and see what's in it...

	Jamie Zawinski
	jwz@spice.cs.cmu.edu
	sun!sunpitt!eti!jwz
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