Building big formats

Some people with very large or complicated documents will need to build big versions of the Plain or LATEX formats. Here's how:
  1. Read the comments at the top of the Big TeX configuration file. It sets most of the TEX parameters to very large values, but you may want to increase or reduce them depending on how much memory you have. It also sets the list of formats in the TEX menu to Big-LATEX and Big-Plain. You can change these to anything you like; just make sure your format names don't contain any spaces.
  2. After making any changes to Big TeX, click on the icon and use ``Get Info'' in the Finder's File menu to set 's preferred memory size to a suitable value (use 3100K if you didn't make any changes).
  3. Restart and select Big TeX from the Config menu.
  4. Run INITEX and type in the appropriate string for the desired format: ``Plain\dump'' for Big-Plain or ``LaTeX.ltx'' for Big-LATEX.
  5. When the dialog box appears, change the format file name to match the name listed in Big TeX (Big-Plain.fmt or Big-LaTeX.fmt) and save the file in the TeX-formats folder.
  6. Delete the log files if you don't want to keep them.
When you want to use a big format, select Big TeX from the Config menu first, then select the desired format from the TEX menu. If you'll be using big formats all the time then you should copy the parameter settings from Big TeX into the Default configuration file and remove Big TeX from the config file list.