Too many math alphabets
TeX mathematics is one of its most impressive features, yet the
internal structure of the mechanism that produces it is painfully
complicated and (in some senses) pathetically limited. One area of
limitation is that one is only allowed 16 ”maths alphabets”
LaTeX offers the user quite a lot of flexibility with allocating
maths alphabets, but few people use the flexibility directly.
Nevertheless, there are many packages that provide symbols, or that
manipulate them, which allocate themselves one or more maths alphabet.
If you can’t afford to drop any of these packages, you might be able
to consider switching to use of XeTeX or
LuaTeX, which both have 65536 alphabet slots
available. (Such a change is best not done when under pressure to
complete a document; other issues, such as font availability) could
make a change impractical.)
Even if switching is not possible, there’s still hope if you’re using
the bm package to support bold maths:
bm is capable of gobbling alphabets as if there is no
tomorrow. The package defines two limiter commands: \
bmmax
(for
bold symbols; default 4) and \
hmmax
(for heavy
symbols, if you have them; default 3), which control the number of
alphabets to be used.
Any reduction of the \
xx
max variables will slow
bm down — but that’s surely better than the document not
running at all. So unless you’re using maths fonts (such as
Mathtime Plus) that feature a heavy symbol weight, suppress all
use of heavy families by
\newcommand{\hmmax}{0}
(before loading bm), and then steadily reduce the bold
families, starting with
\newcommand{\bmmax}{3}
(again before loading bm), until (with a bit of luck) the
error goes away.
- bm.sty
- Distributed as part of macros/latex/required/tools (or browse the directory); catalogue entry
This question on the Web: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=manymathalph