[OS X TeX] Conflict between qtree.sty and memoir

[Alan Munn]

At 10:06 AM -0600 3/4/05, Frederick Hoyt wrote:
>
>
>I have tried using the memoir class, but it conflicts with one of 
>the packages which I use heavily (qtree.sty).


I asked about this problem on the Ling-TeX mailing list, and Alexis 
Dimitriadis (who wrote the front end to qtree) helpfully posted a 
solution.  I don't know whether this is of general interest to 
non-linguists (does anyone else use qtree.sty?), but I post the 
solution anyway.

Alan

At 11:20 PM +0100 3/4/05, Alexis Dimitriadis wrote:
>Short answer: if you have etex, add the following to the preamble 
>and the test file should run:
>
>\documentclass[11pt]{memoir}
>\makeatletter
>\insc at unt=60000
>\makeatother
>
>\\usepackage{qtree}
>\begin{document}
>\chapter{Introduction}
>
>\Tree [.S This [.VP [.V is ] \qroof{a simple tree}.NP ] ]
>
>\end{document}
>
>
>The details:
>
>Qtree and memoir together do indeed use up latex's supply of \skip 
>registers. Qtree is a terrible hog for \skips, it uses no less than 
>64 of them (the tree-drawing engine uses three sets of 20 lengths to 
>simulate dimension stacks... hey, i didn't write that part. But it 
>works). I hadn't seen any machines run out of registers since some 
>early Mac (68K) ports of TeX, but now qtree has met an even bigger 
>hog! Memoir allocates over 100 \skips, and the total causes TeX to 
>go belly up.
>
>Fortunately, etex has arrived just in time with 16 bits of skip 
>registers. Almost. I don't know Mike's configuration, but I'm using 
>MikTeX 2.4, in which e-TeX is the default engine. Nevertheless, when 
>I tried the test script I got the error message about running out of 
>skips (at 230, for some reason).
>
>The problem is that while the etex kernel makes 2^16 registers 
>available, the limits in latex.ltx have not been adjusted. The 
>LaTeX3 team "have decided not to rewrite the 2e kernel to take
>   advantage of features provided by e-TeX". (So they have 
>announced). So to get over the old-tex resource limits, it's a 
>simple matter of telling latex that it can keep handing out \skip 
>registers. Hence the adjustment to \insc at unt. At least I got plenty 
>of complex trees to format correctly, so that seems to be all that's 
>required
>
>Disclaimers: Your document will obviously fail to run on TeXs with 
>8-bit registers, so use at your own risk. And if anyone knows of a 
>more principled way to tell LaTeX about the increased capacity of 
>etex (perhaps an etex.sty package?), I'd like to know.
>
>Alexis
>
>PS. Would you please pass this on to Fred Hoyt and company? I'm not 
>on that list...
>
>
>----- Original Message ----- From: "Alan Munn" <amunn at msu.edu>
>To: <ling-tex at ifi.uio.no>
>Sent: Friday, 04 March, 2005 20:42
>Subject: Re: Ling-TeX: memoir.cls and qtree.sty incompatibility
>
>>At 1:31 PM -0500 3/4/05, Michael W. Daniels wrote:
>>>On Fri, Mar 04, 2005 at 12:05:02PM -0500, Alan Munn wrote:
>>>>  It seems that memoir.cls and qtree.sty are incompatible.  Here is the
>>>>  a minimal example, plus the associated log file:  (I realise that
>>>>  this is an older version of memoir, but assuming Fred's version is
>>>>  newer, it is unlikely to make a difference.
>>>>
>>>>  ...
>>>>  ! No room for a new \skip .
>>>
>>>This line is the key error -- the TeX engine can only handle 256 skips
>>>in total; this limit cannot be changed via configuration files.
>>>
>>>You should try using the eTeX engine instead -- it can handle 65535
>>>skips. On many distributions (including web2c), you should just be
>>>able to run the command 'elatex' instead of 'latex'.
>>
>>Unfortunately this doesn't seem to work on the example I gave.  A 
>>comparison of the two log files shows no differences either.
>>
>>Alan
>>

-- 
Alan Munn                                                   amunn at msu.edu
Department of Linguistics                                   amunn at acm.org
and Germanic, Slavic, Asian and African Languages   Fax.  +1-517-432-2736
Michigan State University, East Lansing MI 48824    Tel.  +1-517-355-7491
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