There is a slight misinformation in the original INSTALLATION files supplied with TeX 3.141 - you are advised to increase the pool size in order to build LaTeX (i.e. lplain.fmt), but you also need to increase the setting for "maxstrings". The following two-liner will suffice as a texmemory.config file for this purpose: set poolsize 64000 set maxstrings 6000 These increased sizes are not needed for actual LaTeX runs, but you may need to increase other `constants' in order to process large files. Note also that if you increase "memmax" in order to build some other TeX variants, you must adjust "memtop" to match while running INITEX. In actual runs (using VIRTEX) the value of "memtop" is ignored, but "memmax" should be at least as big as the one used to dump the .fmt file in INITEX. Happy TeXing Dave 11-Mar-93