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I have this error: Dimension to large. } the code is:

\documentclass{report}
\usepackage{pgffor}  
\parindent=0cm
\begin{document}
    \foreach \n in {1,...,20000}{
Hola a todos. el numero es \n   \\
}
\end{document}
Andrey Vinajera
  • 195
  • Yes, the "magical number" here is 16383. If you loop until 16382, it's fine. Don't ask me why, but for historical reasons TeX has that limitation. But frankly, even after a few lines the content of that document is no longer exciting. ;-) –  Nov 07 '18 at 00:49
  • @marmot Could you elaborate what exactly is the limitation here? If you rewrite that code with a plain \loop \repeat construction, you can well go beyond the 20,000 lines limit. – siracusa Nov 07 '18 at 01:56

1 Answers1

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I don't know if this qualifies for an answer. There are two facts that come into play:

  1. pgffor works with dimensions, see e.g. this nice answer. This has several advantages, among them the fact that you can loop over non-integers. Drawbacks include the above observation and some inaccuracies reported e.g. here.
  2. The maximal dimension is 16383.99999pt, see e.g. here. The loop will stop when the number exceeds 16383-1. A precise explanation of the -1 would require to look up the internals of pgffor, but I do not see a motivation for this.

So the bottom-line is that you cannot go above 16382 in the above loop.