BibTeX author tag string limitation

Question

I've stumbled upon a limitation within BibTeX. I have to cite a medline entry which admittedly has a huge list of authors. When I take them all, LaTeX refuses to compile my document, when they're shortened by half it works flawlessly. Therefore, I assume that I have to recompile BibTeX using bigger constants. Does anyone of you know how to do that ? Btw I'm using the latest MacTex bundle package.

Answer 1

Unfortunately the size of internal buffers is fixed at compile-time with BibTeX, which is a frequent annoyance. However, there also is the bibtex8 binary available in most TeX distros (including MacTeX), which, besides support for 8-bit character codes, also provides a command line interface for the size of internal data structures.

I commonly use it with the -w or --wolfgang switch, which apparently allocates all buffers in a reasonable size (as, for instance, required for or use with biblatex if one does not want to use the Biber backend).

So before recompiling BibTeX just give a try to bibtex8 -W.