after jumping back into the fray again (and some more google searching, leading to http://www.mail-archive.com/tetex%40informatik.uni-hannover.de/msg01064.html), i found the fix: editing texk/web2c/tex.ch and changing the line that looks like this:
@d ssup_max_strings ==65535 to: @d ssup_max_strings ==@"FFFFFFF this will let you crank the max_strings setting in texmf.cnf to a nice large value. (otherwise you'll be beating your head against the brick wall i was at, where you couldn't crank max_strings past some value around 50000. it needs to be over 100000.) (there's nothing like default maximums that probably haven't been changed since the seventies. :) it probably wouldn't be a bad idea to add this information and the details about the various sizes that need to be used in texmf.cnf to the howto documentation. i'll tackle my openjade problems tomorrow. (but has anyone used openjade 1.4devel to build the tex version of the manual? you don't need to build the full pdf to test it, just do a 'make tex'.) jim
