[pdftex] Increasing grouping levels

[Bernd Raichle]

On Thursday, 1 April 2004 20:23:58 +0100,
Robin Fairbairns <Robin.Fairbairns at cl.cam.ac.uk> writes:
 > > On Thu, 2004-04-01 at 18:04, Robin Fairbairns wrote:
 > > 
 > > > but in actual practice these things are pretty unusual.  my guess would
 > > > be that if you looked at the error traceback for the nesting levels,
 > > > you would see a closely repeated pattern.
 > > 
 > > It appears when I try to generate a PDF from a 3/4Mo TeX file with many
 > > sections. When these big files are split, everything is fine...
 > > Every \begin is \end'ed, and all things like this.
 > 
 > it's nesting that counts, not whether they all match.  i still find it
 > difficult to believe that your document has 255 _real_ grouping
 > levels: 

If you are using pdf-_e-TeX_ you can make use of e-TeX's additional
tracing capabilities:

 - Set \tracinggroups=1 and all group entries and exits will be logged.  

 - Place \showgroups at the places where you want to see the current
   grouping level and nesting.
   For your problem: If you place it before and after a \input or
   \include command you will see if the file will open/close more
   groups as expected.


 > > > unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be a traceback for grouping level,
 > > > as you can see from
 > > 
 > > >   \documentclass{article}
 > > >   \setcounter{errorcontextlines}{999}
 > > >   \begin{document}
 > > >   \def\a{\begingroup\a}
 > > >   \a
 > > >   \end{document}
 > > 
 > > There is no such recursive def in my source.
 > 
 > i didn't suppose there was; i was just demonstrating that there's no
 > traceback even though there are 255 nested functional calls.

I think that there _is_ a similar definition in your source.  In many
cases the \begingroup or '{' is deeply hidden inside some
\if... constructs, where the then or else branch has the nesting
\endgroup but the other branch is missing it.


 > however, it might be useful to know what the error message _does_ tell
 > you.

!!!

[...]

Best wishes,
  -bernd
_____________________________________________________________________
Bernd Raichle                                  "Le langage est source
Autor des `german.sty' (aktuell: v2.5e)         de malentendus"
DE-TeX-FAQ: http://www.dante.de/faq/de-tex-faq/ (A. de Saint-Exupery)