18 June 1995
On some small systems (perhaps most noticeably emTeX for PCs if your machine is unable to use the TeX386 version) LaTeX uses up a large amount of the available memory to TeX, leaving very little to store any further commands, complex text (such as tables), floats or cross references that may occur in a typical document. Note that these limits are built into the TeX executable and do not directly correspond to any physical memory that your machine has installed.
In order to help with this problem, we are releasing an *experimental* configuration of LaTeX in which certain functions are not predefined in the format, but are loaded automatically from a style file the first time they are used. This saves a lot of memory in the case that a document does not use these features.
In this release two environments are `auto-loaded' in this way: `picture' and `tabbing'.
MAKING THE FORMAT =================
Process the file autoload.ins (with plain TeX or LaTeX, not iniTeX).
This will produce three files.
latexa.ltx source file for the smaller format. autopict.sty package containing the source for picture mode autotabg.sty package containing the source for tabbing environment
The `latexa' format should then be made by running iniTeX on the file `latexa.ltx'.
To do this, follow the instructions in install.txt (and emtex.txt etc) but replace: `latex.ltx' and `latex.fmt' by `latexa.ltx' and `latexa.fmt'.
Finally, `autopict.sty' and `autotabg.sty' should be moved to the directory in which the other LaTeX .sty files have been placed.
USING THE FORMAT ================
The resulting format should normally be used in exactly the same way as standard LaTeX.
Picture mode can be used without any special commands. Since picture mode is not pre-defined, you will notice TeX loading the `autopict' package the first time you use