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Is there a limit on the length of an index that can be handled by LaTeX?

My situation is as follows. I have a set of about 30 documents which contain technical information about a product. The content of these documents must cover a set of requirements dictated by a third party. Consequently, for each requirement that the documentation satisfies, we create an index entry. These index entries are collected across all the documents and are ordered according to the 3rd party requirements set as:

REQ #1.1.1
 - Doc A ................ 3
 - Doc B ............23, 34

REQ #1.1.2
 - Doc B ................12
 - Doc D ........9, 55, 102

etc...

I am providing this information as a separate 'trace' document as an additional file to complement the actual document set, but I am finding that the process dies once this trace document reaches 34 pages.

This is a bizarre error:

) [1] (./master.ind
! Dimension too large. 
\@addviper ...m \advance \@reqcolroom \ht \@viper 
                                                  \advance \@reqcolroom \str...
l.2562 \end{strip}

What is strange is that if I remove say the first half of the index entries, and simply have the system work on everything beyond the 50% mark, the document compiles. If I remove the second half of the index entries and use only the first half, the document compiles. When all the index entries are together, the document burps the above error. This leads me to believe that it's not a syntax error in the way the indexes are created (they compile when there are not so many of them).

Any ideas on what could be causing this trouble?

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Some more context is needed. What package provides the strip environment, for example? – egreg Mar 13 '12 at 18:29
the fact that the error deals with a too-large dimension seems to indicate that the problem is not too many pages (properly paginated indexes can be enormously long!) but either the length of a page or the height of something being put on the page. as @egreg points out, knowing where the strip environment comes from and how it is defined is probably critical to solving the problem. – barbara beeton Mar 13 '12 at 18:39
Not sure how I would determine where 'strip' is sourced. I will investigate if there is something that is too long which is affecting things right away. – panagioti Mar 13 '12 at 19:01
Actually, the 'strip' command is used in a \begin and \end capacity as the 2nd and next to last lines in the .ind file generated by makeindex. This command is what allows the index to be single-column, rather than the default 2-column. – panagioti Mar 13 '12 at 19:18
(@egreg:) From some brief searching, a strip environment is provided by the cuted package, which is part of the sttools bundle. @panagioti: are you using the cuted package? If you are, one way to test where the strip environment is coming from would be to comment out the \usepackage{cuted} line and see if the strip environment is still recognised or if it throws an error. – Staves Mar 13 '12 at 20:02
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closed as too localized by Marco Daniel, Joseph Wright♦ Apr 15 '12 at 9:56

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