-
Notifications
You must be signed in to change notification settings - Fork 318
TeX capacity exceeded, sorry
Sometimes when converting a MATLAB(R) figure into TikZ, LaTeX will bail out with an error message of the type
! TeX capacity exceeded, sorry [main memory size=5000000].
The error is caused by a memory limitation built into the classical TeX implementations and occurs when you try to compile documents with too many data points in it.
There are at multiple possible work-arounds for this problem.
The LuaTeX project was created several years ago in order to deal with the shortcomings of the classical TeX implementations. One of LuaTeX's benefits is that it removes the strict memory limitation. If you are using a reasonably modern TeX distribution, it is probably already included in your environment. Try to run the lualatex command in your system prompt:
lualatex main.texand see if it works for you.
You could either manually reduce the number of points you are plotting. But we also provide the cleanfigure that tries to do this automatically for you.
Generally, this is good idea even when using LuaLaTeX, as the compile time of your figures depends strongly on the number of points you want to plot.
Most of the time, you do not need as many data points as MATLAB(R) includes in its figure. To make the figure a little sparser (without losing too much information), matlab2tikz provides the cleanfigure() script. In particular, the subfunction coarsenLine() might help you out.
Run matlab2tikz with the additional parameters floatFormat and for example %.3f to output the numbers with three decimals. The default of m2t is %.15g.
If you cannot (or are reluctant to) change your compiler, you can increase the memory available to LaTeX. This will not remove the problem completely: for a lot bigger figures, you will still encounter problems.
The procedure differs for the different LaTeX distributions and is explained in more detail in Section 6.1 of the pgfplots manual. This manual also contains ways to edit those limits e.g. on a per-user basis (might be needed if you don't have write access to these files, as might be the case in a corporate environment).
Execute the following command in your prompt (Windows > Run > "cmd")
initexmf --edit-config-file=pdflatexThis opens an editor where you can put the new values. E.g.
main_memory=5000000
extra_mem_bot=5000000
font_mem_size=5000000
pool_size=5000000
buf_size=5000000
Afterwards call initexmf --dump=pdflatex to update the LaTeX format files.
For regular LaTeX instead of PDFLaTeX, replace pdflatex with latex above.
Edit your texmf.cnf file. This file can be found at e.g. /usr/local/texlive/2014/texmf.cnf (for TeXLive/MacTeX 2014). Change its contents to contain something like:
main_memory=5000000
extra_mem_bot=5000000
font_mem_size=5000000
pool_size=5000000
buf_size=5000000
Afterwards, call texhash to update the LaTeX format files.
If you are unable to use any other way, you can always export your figure as a different format. Typically, if you export a lot of points to a vectorized format such as TikZ, PDF or EPS your file size grows quite large. So it might be worthwhile to export your figure to a PNG figure.
If you still want the typical style of a pgfplots figure, you can use the approach suggested in the pgfplots manual in Section 4.3.8 in the paragraph entitled "Support for External Three-Dimensional Graphics". As its name suggests, this is especially interesting for 3D plots, for which TikZ only has basic support anyway.
-
C. Feuersänger, Pgfplots manual:
- Chapter 6: Memory and speed considerations
- Section 4.3.8: Support for External Three-Dimensional Graphics