Maximum ghostscript input filesize? Adjustable parameter?

[Trevor Baca]

Hi everyone,

I'd like to introduce myself and then ask a question. My name's Trevor
Baca and I'm a composer working in Austin, Texas. I just started using
LilyPond for the very first time at the beginning of July, and I'm
already completelly blown away. I model notation algorithmically in
Mathematica and, for this reason, I've been working in SCORE for a
couple of years due to the availability of SCORE's cleartext .pmx
input format. But I can't even begin to express how much better
LilyPond's input format is! I wish I had discovered LilyPond about
three years ago ... And then there's the fact that Lily's output just
*looks* so good ...

And thank you, everybody, for the snippets in the snippet repository
and for the examples in the regression battery. Learning's been a
breeze because of the tons of examples and the fact that the docs read
great.

Anyway, I've run into my first problem. I run Lily on my file
("test.ly") and the parsing, rendering, and postscript output happen
just fine, and then ghostscript blows up. I should mention right away,
however, that Lily's been calling ghostscript perfectly on all of my
other files up to this point with no problems; the problem seems to be
not with the gs commandline parameters but with the *size* of the
input file.

Here's Lily's verbose output for the test file, all under Mac OS X with 2.6.0:

====================================================

Trevor-Bacas-Computer:~/Desktop trevorbaca$ lilypond --verbose test.ly
GNU LilyPond 2.6.0

LILYPOND_DATADIR="/Users/hanwen/src/maclily/BUILD/LilyPond.app/Contents/Resources//share/lilypond/2.6.0"
LILYPONDPREFIX="/Applications/LilyPond.app//Contents/Resources/share/lilypond/current"
LOCALEDIR="/Users/hanwen/src/maclily/BUILD/LilyPond.app/Contents/Resources//share/locale"

Effective prefix:
"/Applications/LilyPond.app//Contents/Resources/share/lilypond/current"
Initializing FontConfig...
adding font directory:
/Applications/LilyPond.app//Contents/Resources/share/lilypond/current/fonts/otf/
adding font directory:
/Applications/LilyPond.app//Contents/Resources/share/lilypond/current/fonts/type1/
adding font directory:
/Applications/LilyPond.app//Contents/Resources/share/lilypond/current/fonts/svg/
Processing `test.ly'
Parsing...[/Applications/LilyPond.app//Contents/Resources/share/lilypond/current/ly/init.ly[/Applications/LilyPond.app//Contents/Resources/share/lilypond/current/ly/declarations-init.ly[/Applications/LilyPond.app//Contents/Resources/share/lilypond/current/ly/music-functions-init.ly][/Applications/LilyPond.app//Contents/Resources/share/lilypond/current/ly/nederlands.ly][/Applications/LilyPond.app//Contents/Resources/share/lilypond/current/ly/drumpitch-init.ly][/Applications/LilyPond.app//Contents/Resources/share/lilypond/current/ly/chord-modifiers-init.ly][/Applications/LilyPond.app//Contents/Resources/share/lilypond/current/ly/script-init.ly][/Applications/LilyPond.app//Contents/Resources/share/lilypond/current/ly/scale-definitions-init.ly][/Applications/LilyPond.app//Contents/Resources/share/lilypond/current/ly/grace-init.ly][/Applications/LilyPond.app//Contents/Resources/share/lilypond/current/ly/midi-init.ly[/Applications/LilyPond.app//Contents/Resources/share/lilypond/current/ly/performer-init.ly]][/Applications/LilyPond.app//Contents/Resources/share/lilypond/current/ly/paper-defaults.ly[/Applications/LilyPond.app//Contents/Resources/share/lilypond/current/ly/titling-init.ly]][/Applications/LilyPond.app//Contents/Resources/share/lilypond/current/ly/engraver-init.ly][/Applications/LilyPond.app//Contents/Resources/share/lilypond/current/ly/dynamic-scripts-init.ly][/Applications/LilyPond.app//Contents/Resources/share/lilypond/current/ly/spanners-init.ly][/Applications/LilyPond.app//Contents/Resources/share/lilypond/current/ly/property-init.ly]][test.ly]
Interpreting music...
[/Applications/LilyPond.app//Contents/Resources/share/lilypond/current/fonts/otf/emmentaler-20.otf][8][16]
elapsed time: 37.99 seconds
Element count 15245 (spanners 662) 
Preprocessing graphical objects... 
Grob count 
24185[/Applications/LilyPond.app//Contents/Resources/share/lilypond/current/fonts/otf/emmentaler-11.otf][/Applications/LilyPond.app//Contents/Resources/share/lilypond/current/fonts/otf/emmentaler-13.otf]
Calculating line breaks... 
Global shortest duration is 1/14
[feta-alphabet11_3.943359375][3][6][9][12][15][17]
Optimal demerits: 1.138294
Element count 13681.[[century_schoolbook_l__italic_1.720703125]0]
Calculating page breaks...[century_schoolbook_l__2.16796875]
Layout output to
`test.ps'...[/Applications/LilyPond.app//Contents/Resources/share/lilypond/current/fonts/type1//c059033l.pfb][/Applications/LilyPond.app//Contents/Resources/share/lilypond/current/fonts/type1//c059013l.pfb][/Applications/LilyPond.app//Contents/Resources/share/lilypond/current/fonts/type1/PFAemmentaler-11.pfa][/Applications/LilyPond.app//Contents/Resources/share/lilypond/current/fonts/type1//feta-alphabet11.pfa][/Applications/LilyPond.app//Contents/Resources/share/lilypond/current/ps/music-drawing-routines.ps][/Applications/LilyPond.app//Contents/Resources/share/lilypond/current/ps/lilyponddefs.ps]
Converting to `test.pdf'...
Invoking `gs   -dSAFER  -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 
-sPAPERSIZE="tabloid" -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -r1200  -sDEVICE=pdfwrite
-sOutputFile="test.pdf" -c .setpdfwrite -f "test.ps"'...ESP
Ghostscript 815.00 (2005-04-20)
Copyright (C) 2004 artofcode LLC, Benicia, CA.  All rights reserved.
This software comes with NO WARRANTY: see the file PUBLIC for details.
WARNING: /Unicode /Decoding resource is not accessible but it is
useful for generating ToUnicode CMap.
Error: /stackoverflow in -file-
Operand stack:
   --nostringval--
Execution stack:
   %interp_exit   .runexec2   --nostringval--   --nostringval--  
--nostringval--   2   %stopped_push   --nostringval--  
--nostringval--   --nostringval--   false   1   %stopped_push   1   3 
 %oparray_pop   1   3   %oparray_pop   1   3   %oparray_pop   1   3  
%oparray_pop   .runexec2   --nostringval--   --nostringval--  
--nostringval--   2   %stopped_push
Dictionary stack:
   --dict:1121/1686(ro)(G)--   --dict:0/20(G)--   --dict:120/200(L)--
Current allocation mode is local
Last OS error: 2
Current file position is 1917239
ESP Ghostscript 815.00: Unrecoverable error, exit code 1

`gs   -dSAFER  -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4  -sPAPERSIZE="tabloid"
-dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -r1200  -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile="test.pdf" -c
.setpdfwrite -f "test.ps"' failed (256)
error: failed files: "test.ly"
2005-07-08 23:42:07.719 open[1870] No such file:
/Users/trevorbaca/Desktop/--verb.pdf
Trevor-Bacas-Computer:~/Desktop trevorbaca$ 

===========================================

What's really frustrating are two things:

A.  I've tried ripping input data out of "test.ly" and, if I go down
from 64 staves to about 45 staves, then the call to gs runs perfectly!

B. Simply calling "open test.ps" on Lily's ps file (which summons
Apple's pdf creator) works fine!

So I suppose the work-around is simply to have Lily bypass the call to
gs altogether and always use Apple's "open" utility to create the pdf,
at least for this large file ... but two questions:

1. Is it possible to make Lily's call to gs work for this large-ish
file? That would be the best solution; Lily calling gs on my smaller
scores works great and I like that way of working.

2. If it's not possible (or worth taking the time to tinker with gs)
could someone offer me a pointer on what file I can edit to have Lily
stop calling gs?


All help appreciated,

Trevor.

[Also, the archive to this list is definitely full of questions about
ghostscript and pdf rendering. I checked as thoroughly as possible
before posting, but couldn't find this exact question addressed
before, but if I didn't look hard enough, please just point me to the
right thread in the archive history!]