How to avoid exceeding TeX capacity when using multi-page tables?

Question

I'm using longtable package (together with xcolor for alternating row colors and booktabs for elegant table headers) to generate a huge table. And by huge, I mean it has more than 900 lines and takes up more than 29 pages. However, I'm getting this error:

TeX capacity exceeded, sorry [main memory size=3000000].

My code is similar to this one:

\newcolumntype{D}{>{\raggedright\arraybackslash}m{54mm}}
% Plus a few other new column types

% Alternating colors starting on 3rd row
\definecolor{tabular-odd-color}{gray}{0.90}
\definecolor{tabular-even-color}{gray}{0.97}
\rowcolors{3}{tabular-odd-color}{tabular-even-color}

\begin{longtable}{DTCNAHHHHHH}

\toprule
col1 & col2 & col3 & col4 & col5 & col6 & col7 & col8 & col9 & col10 & col11 \\
\midrule
\endhead

% LOTS of rows here. I mean, maybe a few thousand, taking up 30, 40 or more pages.

\bottomrule

\end{longtable}

How can I avoid exceeding the TeX capacity?

(by the way, I'm using pdflatex from texlive)

(I've already read this page, but my rows already have blank lines between them, thus that solution does not apply to me.)

Answer 1

Use luatex it dynamically allocates memory so you are limited by the physical memory available AFAIK (there is no sample file that I can test to tell if it actually works).

Answer 2

A first possibility is to add the option --extra-mem-top=n to your invocation of pdflatex. Replace n by a number of which you suppose it's big enough.

A more permanent solution is to invoke initexmf --edit-config-file=latex and change the line with main_memory. Afterwards you have to rebuild your format files using initexmf --dump=latex. Perform the same for pdflatex to get all configurations straight.

But these are just workarounds, there could be other problems with your document that lead to exceeded capacity errors. Does your document compile with a subset of the rows? Are you sure all your \newcolumntype's and such are correct?