Conference vaxuum::document_ft

171.0. "Floating to infinity?" by FNYFS::WYNFORD (The Rented Loony) Tue Mar 31 1987 05:21

I ran what I thought was going to be the final build of a document last night
and discovered an interesting bug/feature.

The document consists of the front matter and four chapters. In the third
chapter I have a lot of <figure_space>(full_page) tags so that I can later
put in mock-ups of reports printed in landscape format. All these figures are
coded explicitly as "floatable" since earlier versions showed too many large 
blanks on preceding pages. There is one figure which includes a picmode file.

I had altered our local doctype to give a \vsize of 55pc following advice in
a previous note and was happy with the result - good use of A4 page area.
The picmode file processed fine before (under the smaller \vsize) so I have
difficulty believing that our problem stems from increasing the page area. It
is, however, the only figure which might sensibly produce the result shown 
in the extract from the LIS file below (coming from an overnight batch run):

--------------------------------------------------------------------- start LIS
.
.
.
'dev:[support_doc.lars]LARS_FS_PRO.DVI'
[3-69] [3-70] figure too large to float--nofloat forced [3-71] [3-72] [3-73] [3
-74] [3-75] [3-76] [3-77] [3-78] [3-79] [3-80] [3-81] [3-82] [3-83] [3-84] [3-8
5] [3-86] [3-87] [3-88] [3-89] [3-90] [3-91] [3-92] [3-93] [3-94] [3-95] [3-96]
.
.
.
[3-19717] [3-19718]

------------------------------------------------------------------- end LIS

The batch log file stopped writing at page 3-69.

The original chapter (using default S.H paper size) was 116 pages - the job 
seemed to be in a fairly tight loop when it was stopped. Unfortunately, until 
it *was* stopped nothing had been written to the .LIS file so we just had to 
assume it was looping... And that is the second problem: how can you tell if
your job is in a loop or just slow if nothing is written to the LIS file as
processing is underway?

I can supply GNCs and the DTP if needed.

Gavin