[XeTeX] Stack exceeded in XeTeX

[John Was]

Hello

I've encountered an odd problem in 'plain' XeTeX which has never happened to me in plain TeX.  For some books (and certainly for a periodical that I handle) I like to have a simple master file listing all of the items that will be included (they sometimes don't arrive in the correct order, or have to be reordered later, so this is the easiest way to avoid having to keep track of changing page numbers for each item).  Thus:

\input jobhead
\input bloggs
\input jones
\input smith
\eject \bye

The first line would be all my definitions - fonts, page dimensions, cropmarks, etc.

XeTeX won't handle this:  it gives up after just a few lines of bloggs's chapter and tells me that the capacity is exceeded (stack limit is 5000).

But I have no trouble at all if instead I put:

\input jobhead

at the start of the bloggs.tex file and

\eject\bye

 at the end, and then typeset bloggs ('xetex bloggs' at the command line - just the normal procedure).

If I am stuck with this,  I'll just have to typeset each chapter separately and put \pageno in manually at the head of each once I have all the chapters in.  But it will never work for a periodical with a large review section (the reviews all run on).

I've tried (lamely) putting \relax after \input jobhead in case for some reason XeTeX needs to pause for breath, but predictably that doesn't work.  The file jobhead.tex itself uses several \input commands, so that basic feature of TeX seems to work as expected.

I'm stumped.  Any ideas?


John

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