Large index causes problems

[Stephan Pabst]

Hello,

I'm currently writing a user manual with Lout 3.12.  An important part of
this document is the - rather extensive - index, so I'm desperately trying
to solve the following problem:

When formatting the document ("database.lt"), Lout stops anywhere between
the second and the fifth run and prints the following error message:

lout:
         fatal error: database file datenbank.ld too deeply nested

The number of runs which are successfully completed before this error
appears, depends on the number of index entries.  I was able to construct
a pair of documents which only differ in one single index entry - one of
the documents gets formatted correctly, the other one produces the above
error message.
My first workaround was the following:

(1) Delete all index entries from the document using the UNIX "sed" command
(2) Process the document (five runs)
(3) Restore all index entries in the document
(4) Process it again, re-using the *.ld and *.li files created in step (2)

This trick worked for a while, but as the document grew, the error message
appeared nevertheless during step (4) - so it is currently impossible to
create a printed version of this user manual.

Another, less serious problem are duplicate page numbers in the index.
In some cases, when putting the same term twice into the index on one page,
this causes the page number to appear twice in the index.  Currently a
reduced version of the index has the following entries:

   Bundesanleihen   2, 7, 7, 9
   Datenquellen
     Handelsblatt   7, 9, 9
   Postanleihen   2, 3, 5, 7, 7, 9

Although this problem disappears when I delete the corresponding index
entries, I would be glad if there was an easier way to avoid duplicate
page numbers.
Thanks for any help,

Stephan