processing very big tables

["Thomas A. Schmitz" <thomas.schmitz@uni-bonn.de>]

Hi all,

I need some fundamental advice from experienced users: I'm processing 
xml and collecting the data in lua tables, which I want to typeset in 
some sort of table or tabular format. Typesetting requirements are 
fairly low, just a couple of columns that need to be nicely aligned, 
with the occasional horizontal overflow that should be handled 
gracefully (i.e. longer lines should be broken), and of course, the 
table has to break across pages. However, the lua tables have several 
thousands of entries, and I expect the final document to have around 
3,000 pages. When I tried Natural Tables, I got a "TeX capacity 
exceeded" error, which disappeared when I tried with a smaller part of 
my document. So my question is: what is the most "inexpensive" way of 
typesetting this sort of material? One of the table environments? Which 
one (would xtables be better?)? Or low-level vboxes within hboxes etc.? 
Or just \framed within \framed? What would you suggest for this sort of 
material?

Thanks for your insights!

Thomas
___________________________________________________________________________________
If your question is of interest to others as well, please add an entry to the Wiki!

maillist : ntg-context@ntg.nl / http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/ntg-context
webpage  : http://www.pragma-ade.nl / http://context.aanhet.net
archive  : https://bitbucket.org/phg/context-mirror/commits/
wiki     : http://contextgarden.net
___________________________________________________________________________________