Extending latex memory

This article originally appeared on http://olezfdtd.wordpress.com I’ve copied it over to my current blog to consolidate all my blogging efforts over the years in one place.

Latex is a very powerful typesetting application. A powerful package to be used with this is pgfplots, which allows you to render your plots using the latex engine. Unfortunately the default latex settings assume you’re running latex on an ancient 20 MHz 486 with less ram than your average mobile phone. This is ok if you’re just asking it to process text, but if you’re using pgfplots it will run out of memory trying to draw your images.

The solution is to increase the amount of memory latex uses.

Windows - Miktex

We’re doing this in the windows command line. You can get to this by opening the start menu and do run .... Type cmd to start the terminal. On vista and up, you can just type cmd in the search field.

1. Go the folder where Miktex is installed. Most likely this is C:\Program Files\Miktex 2.7\

2. Go to the subfolder Miktex

3. Go to the subfolder bin

4. run

   initexmf --edit-config-file=pdflatex
   

   Replace pdflatex with latex or xetex if you’re using that.

5. You’ll get a notepad screen with a file called pdflatex.ini. Add the line

   main_memory=2000000
   

   Don’t worry about the exact number, just make it big.

6. Save the file

7. run

   initexmf --dump=pdflatex
   

8. That’s it. Enjoy your nice pgfplots figures

Linux - Texlive

Do the following things in a terminal as root.

1. Find out where your texmf.cnf is located

   kpsewhich texmf.cnf
   

   This will most likely be /usr/share/texmf/web2c/texmf.cnf

2. Open it and search for main_memory line and modify it to

   main_memory=2000000
   

3. Save the file

4. run

   fmtutil-sys --all
   

   to load the new settings