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<head>
<title>UK TeX FAQ -- question label buffovl</title>
</head><body>
<h3>Unable to read an entire line</h3>
<p/>TeX belongs to the generation of applications written for
environments that didn&#8217;t offer the sophisticated string and i/o
manipulation we nowadays take for granted (TeX was written in
Pascal, and the original Pascal standard made no mention of i/o, so
that anything but the most trivial operations were likely to be
unportable).
<p/>When you overwhelm TeX&#8217;s input mechanism, you get told:
<pre>
! Unable to read an entire line---bufsize=3000.
    Please ask a wizard to enlarge me.
</pre>
(for some value of &#8216;3000&#8217; &#8212; the quote was from a
<i>comp.text.tex</i> posting by a someone who was presumably
using an old TeX).
<p/>As the message implies, there&#8217;s (what TeX thinks of as a) line in
your input that&#8217;s &#8220;too long&#8221; (to TeX&#8217;s way of thinking).  Since
modern distributions tend to have tens of thousands of bytes of input
buffer, it&#8217;s somewhat rare that these messages occur &#8220;for real&#8221;.
Probable culprits are:
<ul>
<li> A file transferred from another system, without translating
  record endings.  With the decline of fixed-format records (on
  mainframe operating systems) and the increased intelligence of
  TeX distributions at recognising other systems&#8217; explicit
  record-ending characters, this is nowadays rather a rare cause of
  the problem.
<li> A graphics input file, which a package is examining for its
  bounding box, contains a binary preview section.  Again,
  sufficiently clever TeX distributions recognise this situation,
  and ignore the previews (which are only of interest, if at all, to a
  TeX previewer).
</ul>
<p/>The usual advice is to ignore what TeX says (i.e., anything about
enlarging), and to put the problem right in the source. 
<p/>If the real problem is over-long text lines, most self-respecting text
editors will be pleased to automatically split long lines (while
preserving the &#8220;word&#8221; structure) so that they are nowhere any longer
than a given length; so the solution is just to edit the file.
<p/>If the problem is a ridiculous preview section, try using
<i>ghostscript</i> to reprocess the file, outputting a &#8220;plain
<code>.eps</code>&#8221; file.  (<i>Ghostscript</i> is distributed with a script
<i>ps2epsi</i> which will regenerate the preview if necessary.)
Users of the shareware program <i>GSview</i> will find buttons to
perform the required transformation of the file being displayed.
<dl>
<dt><tt><i>ghostscript</i></tt><dd>Browse <a href="http://mirror.ctan.org/support/ghostscript">support/ghostscript</a>
<dt><tt><i>GSview</i></tt><dd>Browse <a href="http://mirror.ctan.org/support/ghostscript/ghostgum">support/ghostscript/ghostgum</a>; <a href="http://mirror.ctan.org//help/Catalogue/entries/gsview.html">catalogue entry</a>
</dl>
<p/><p>This question on the Web: <a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=buffovl">http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=buffovl</a>
</body>