>>5000 labels is easy to reach if you are using the label mechanism >>extensively. > > This is real life with critical editions in the "classical" style > where footnotes don't refer by footnote marks but by line numbers. > ednotes.sty originally used three labels for one footnote > and broke with, say, 400 pages. A LaTeX translation of the largest of the four religious texts (English language) in Jon Bosak's 1998 XML demos might reasonably have at least 24000 labels. See http://www.ibiblio.org/bosak/ http://metalab.unc.edu/bosak/xml/eg/rel200.zip -- Bill