[OS X TeX] Fontspec and memory management

[Herbert Schulz]

On Jul 7, 2013, at 3:59 AM, Jacques ANDRÉ <jacques.andre35 at gmail.com> wrote:

> The following program (obviously it is a minimal extract to show the problem) loops on MacOSX 10.8.2, and TeXLive 2013:
> 
> %!TEX encoding = UTF-8 Unicode 
> \documentclass{article} 
> \usepackage{fontspec}
> \usepackage{multido}
> \newcounter{ctr}
> \begin{document}
> \multido{\ia=0+1}{130000}{\setcounter{ctr}{\ia}} % runs OK 
> \multido{\ia=0+1}{100000}{\fontspec{Arial}}% OK
> \multido{\ia=0+1}{110000}{\fontspec{Arial}}% TeX capacity exceeded, sorry [number of strings=494718].
> \end{document}
> 
> as if fontspec leaves "something" in core memory. Bug or feature?
> 
> Jacques André


Howdy,

While this may represent a memory leak, I'm no expert on that, it is certainly NOT the way to do this since it has to recalculate the setting for Arial on each \fontspec. It is much faster to define a \newfontfamily or \newfontface and then re-use the information.

Good Luck,

Herb Schulz
(herbs at wideopenwest dot com)