[luatex] Metapost capacity exceeded

[Mojca Miklavec]

On Tue, May 29, 2012 at 7:23 AM, Jean wrote:
> I wrote a lualatex file with some Metapost figures in it and I had the
> message "Metapost capacity exceeded". So I have tried an experiment.
...
> --- copy-paste begins
> ! MetaPost capacity exceeded, sorry [main memory size=5000].
> --- copy-paste ends
>
> Where does this "5000" value come from?

>From texmf.cnf. Try to locate it with "kpsewhich texmf.cnf" or with
"locate texmf.cnf", but there may be more than a single file.

> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Second part of the experiment:
>
> I have downloaded the latest version of lualatex from
> http://www.luatex.org/download.html. This version is:
>
> --- copy-paste begins
> This is LuaTeX, Version beta-0.70.1-2011051918 (rev 4277)
> --- copy-paste ends
>
> When I compile figure 1 or any other with this version, I do not get
> any PDF file.  Standard output contains:
> --- copy-paste begins
> This is LuaTeX, Version beta-0.70.1-2011051918 (rev 4277)
>
> (Fatal format file error; I'm stymied)
> --- copy-paste ends
> and standard error contains much more information, too big
> to copy-paste here.

You need to regenerate the format with
    sudo fmtutil-sys --byfmt lualatex
but it is not guaranteed that you would succeed with such a big
difference in luatex's version and such an old tex distribution. There
might be some important changes and improvements in other packages
that will be difficult to locate.

> So my question would rather be: how can I install a lualatex version
> into a sandbox, without trashing the version installed in /usr/bin?

There are a lot of other ways, but this one is the simplest and
spotting problems in there might be most valuable:

Fetch TeX Live 2012 from here:
    http://tug.org/texlive/pretest.html

You need to run
    ./install-tl -repository <url>
where you can pick any <url> here: http://tug.org/texlive/mirmon/
(only http/ftp), then you can try to install some scheme (not too
minimal, but I guess that basic scheme should work for you if network
speed is an issue, else you can also simply fetch the whole repository
with rsync and install full scheme).

After the end of installation, put
<path/to/tl/installation>/bin/x86_64-linux (or whatever will be the
path to binaries) in front of PATH variable.

That way you will get the latest luatex, the latest packages, ... and
something that will become part of Ubuntu one day. You can easily
install anywhere in /home directory without having to interfere with
the system.

Mojca