Master/texmf-doc/doc/english/FAQ-en/html/FAQ-manymathalph.html


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<head>
<title>UK TeX FAQ -- question label manymathalph</title>
</head><body>
<h3>Too many math alphabets</h3>
<p/>TeX mathematics is one of its most impressive features, yet the
internal structure of the mechanism that produces it is painfully
complicated and (in some senses) pathetically limited.  One area of
limitation is that one is only allowed 16 &rdquo;maths alphabets&rdquo;
<p/>LaTeX offers the user quite a lot of flexibility with allocating
maths alphabets, but few people use the flexibility directly.
Nevertheless, there are many packages that provide symbols, or that
manipulate them, which allocate themselves one or more maths alphabet.
<p/>If you can&rsquo;t afford to drop any of these packages, there&rsquo;s
still hope if you&rsquo;re using the <i>bm</i> package to support
<a href="FAQ-boldgreek.html">bold maths</a>: <i>bm</i> is capable
of gobbling alphabets as if there is no tomorrow.  The package defines
two limiter commands: <code>\</code><code>bmmax</code> (for <em>bold</em> symbols; default 4)
and <code>\</code><code>hmmax</code> (for <em>heavy</em> symbols, if you have them;
default 3), which control the number of alphabets to be used.  
<p/>Any reduction of the <code>\</code><code><em>xx</code>max</em> variables will slow
<i>bm</i> down &mdash; but that&rsquo;s surely better than the document not
running at all.  So unless you&rsquo;re using maths fonts (such as
<i>Mathtime Plus</i>) that feature a heavy symbol weight, suppress all
use of heavy families by
<blockquote>
<pre>
  \renewcommand{\hmmax}{0}
</pre>
</blockquote><p>
and then steadily reduce the bold families, starting with
<blockquote>
<pre>
  \renewcommand{\bmmax}{3}
</pre>
</blockquote><p>
until (with a bit of luck) the error goes away.
<dl>
<dt><tt><i>bm.sty</i></tt><dd>Distributed as part of <a href="ftp://cam.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/required/tools.zip">macros/latex/required/tools</a> (<a href="ftp://cam.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/required/tools.tar.gz">gzipped tar</a>, <a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/macros/latex/required/tools/">browse</a>)
</dl>
<p/><p>This question on the Web: <a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=manymathalph">http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=manymathalph</a>
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