# Words of more than 32765 characters

When I compile the following document:

\documentclass[10pt, oneside, a4paper]{report}
\begin{document}
xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
\end{document}


where the number of x's is greater than 32765, Adobe Reader is not able to read the document anymore, and just produces a blank page. Has anybody come across this before?

• The actual limit seems to be 32767 = 2^{15}-1; other PDF viewers don't choke even with 1073741 characters (Skim on Mac OS X). – egreg Sep 29 '11 at 13:07
• Have you tried different versions of Adobe Reader/Acrobat? – einpoklum Sep 29 '11 at 14:50
• How the heck did you come across this behavior? – doncherry Sep 29 '11 at 15:04
• In the anglophone world, it is standard that the . in 32.765 would be interpreted as a decimal point. That is, 32.765 is less than 33. The typical thousands separator is the comma ,. The numbers here are not so big, so I edited the post to just remove the separator. I believe this is the least ambiguous approach. – Seamus Sep 29 '11 at 15:12
• @doncherry Where I work, we use LaTeX for document generation. One of the unit tests produce a very funky report, including such a string. The reason for the string, is actually to test what happens when generating an excel-sheet, where the maximum number of characters in a cell is larger than 32.767. – utdiscant Sep 30 '11 at 17:49

• I tried indeed with \romannumeral 32767000 to print a string consisting of 32677 m's and Reader opened it; with 32768 it didn't. Probably Reader is enforcing the limit, while other programs don't (see my comment above). – egreg Sep 29 '11 at 17:45