Re: Stupid question of the (next?) month

[Hans Hagen <pragma@wxs.nl>]

At 11:12 PM 10/23/2001 +0200, Giuseppe Bilotta wrote:

>I'd like each page to have an 'indefinite' length, clipped each
>time at a certain sectionlevel. For example, each page would be a
>chapter long (yes, not the other way round). TeX can do things
>like this, but there's the usual 5.7 meters limit (about 25 A4
>pages). Of course such a thing only makes sense in PDF production
>mode, because DVI viewers are not friendly with multiple page
>sizes per document.
>
>So the questions are:
>
>(1) How to setup ConTeXt to create each physical page at chapter
>boundary (within the TeX limit)? (I know PDFs support different
>page sizes in the same document, so this is fine.)

this is quite doable, but i wonder if you want to know the perverse details

>[Things like footnotes & such would become 'marginal'; all float
>placements would become 'here'; how to deal with columns?]

hm, so you would need to use local footnotes, which is no problem

>(2) Can ConTeXt+pdf-e-TeX+Perl get around the TeX limit? (By
>postprocessing an appropriate PDF file.)

there is also a pdf limit

actually, you can build a pretty large box in tex as long as no 
calculations > maxdimen are donw; tex only checks calculations, so 
technically you can do something: \setbox0=\vbox{\dorecurse{10K}{craplines} 
and then start splitting (this is one way to make A0 posters with 50 
columns -)

Hans
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