[xep-support] Maximum pages in a document

[David Tolpin]

> 
>> Would I be able to render a 16,000 (yes sixteen-thousand) document using
>> XEP?
>>
>
> pages? cows? characters? dollar?? words? lines?
> 

Well, yes. Generally, a document of virtually any size (having less
than 2^32 blocks (fo:block) in it) can be formatted using XEP. Practically, though,
two limitations come into play: 

- amount of RAM - the current commercially available version of XEP keeps the whole
document's internal representation in memory and requires very roughly 
300 Kb per page + some footprint;

- file size - many implementations limit file size to 2Gb; with approximately
10Kb per page it means that 200,000 pages is a rough estimate for the maximum document's
size.

For a 16000 pages long document formatted in a single pass, roughly
4-5Gb of RAM is required with the current version. 

However, As Nikolai has pointed out, the document can be split into
smaller parts if it does not contain global cross-references through
the whole document. Besides that, we have been able to achieve certain
improvements that will definitely make XEP less memory-hungry; we are
going to release a version that uses disk files to store internal representation
and thus makes it possible to format huge document within a limited amount of memory.

David Tolpin
RenderX

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