[OS X TeX] No room for a new \dimen

[Morten Høgholm]

On Wed, 10 Oct 2007 13:02:16 +0200, Florian Grammel wrote:

>> ! No room for a new \dimen .
>> \ch at ck ...\else \errmessage {No room for a new #3}
>
> error. The UK-TeX-FAQ told me that this was a heritage from early TeX- 
> times and suggests
>
> \usepackage{etex}

And rightly so.

> This works for the minimal example below but as soon as I add the next  
> package
>
> \usepackage{index}
>
> to it, I'm back where I started from...
>
> Isn't etex supposed to "increase the number of TEX’s count, dimen, skip,  
> muskip, box, and token registers from 256 to 32768." and thus provide  
> ample space?
>
> I simply don't get it. Maybe any of you can shed some light on this  
> behaviour or even propose a solution?

The problem is the concept of insertions (defined by \newinsert) used for  
floats and footnotes mainly. eTeX does not raise the number of available  
insertions and since each insertion need registers of the other types you  
can still get into trouble. Insertions are allocated from 254 and down so  
if you have already defined a lot of \dimen or \skip registers, you may  
not be able to allocate the insertion in question.

For this reason, etex.sty provides \reserveinserts, usage follows from a  
class file I happen to have open in Aquamacs...


\RequirePackage{l3names}
\ProvidesExplClass{dtu-statistics}
   {2007/10/10}{0.34}{Class for DTU books (MH)}
% Enable etex registers as soon as possible with memoir!
\RequirePackage{ifpdf,etex,trace,l3calc}
\reserveinserts{30}
-- 
Morten

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