Help! xmlto crashes on simple input

["Kevin S. Van Horn" <kvanhorn@ksvanhorn.com>]

I'm new to XML and DocBook, and as one of my first experiments with the 
DocBook tools I tried to process a file "charent.xml" that simply lists 
all the character entities (copied from the DocBook DTD). The command I 
gave was

  xmlto ps charent.xml

and the result was the following diagnostic messages, with no charent.ps 
file produced:

  Making portrait pages on USletter paper (8.5inx11in)
  ! Unable to read an entire line---bufsize=200000.
  Please increase buf_size in texmf.cnf.
  This is TeX, Version 3.14159 (Web2C 7.3.1)
  (tmp.fo
  LaTeX2e <2001/06/01>
  Babel <v3.7h> and hyphenation patterns for american, french, german,
     ngerman, italian, nohyphenation, loaded.
  xmltex version: 2000/09/07 v1.8y (Exp):
  (/usr/share/texmf/tex/xmltex/xmltex.cfg)

I used "bash -x" with xmlto to find out exactly what processing steps 
were happening, and verified that the output of xsltproc is one 
enormously long line, with no line breaks whatsoever.

So it seems that we have one tool in the chain producing an entire file 
as one line, and the next tool in the chain insisting on reading its 
input one line at a time, into a fixed-size buffer, instead of one 
character at a time.

The tool versions I'm using are whatever you get with RedHat 9.0.  The 
output of xmlto --version is
  xmlto version 0.0.12
and the output of xsltproc --version is
  Using libxml 20504, libxslt 10027 and libexslt 718
  xsltproc was compiled against libxml 20504, libxslt 10027 and
    libexslt 718
  libxslt 10027 was compiled against libxml 20504
  libexslt 718 was compiled against libxml 20504

Has anyone else run into this problem?  Is there a straightforward 
workaround?  Frankly, I find it hard to see how the toolchain is usable 
at all with a bug like this.

Here is a partial listing of charent.xml:

------- begin charent.xml ----------

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE article PUBLIC  "-//OASIS//DTD DocBook XML V4.1.2//EN"
    "http://docbook.org/xml/4.1.2/docbookx.dtd" [
]>
 
<article>
<articleinfo>
  <title>DocBook 4.1.2 Character Entities</title>
</articleinfo>
 
<sect1><title><filename>iso-amsa.ent</filename></title>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem><para>&cularr; <markup>&amp;cularr;</markup></para></listitem>
<listitem><para>&curarr; <markup>&amp;curarr;</markup></para></listitem>
<listitem><para>&dArr; <markup>&amp;dArr;</markup></para></listitem>
<listitem><para>&darr2; <markup>&amp;darr2;</markup></para></listitem>

  ET CETERA

</itemizedlist>
</sect1>
 
<sect1><title><filename>iso-amsc.ent</filename></title>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem><para>&rceil; <markup>&amp;rceil;</markup></para></listitem>
<listitem><para>&rfloor; <markup>&amp;rfloor;</markup></para></listitem>

  ET CETERA

</itemizedlist>
</sect1>

  ET CETERA

</article>
---------- end charent.xml ----------

wc charent.xml:
   1099    2046   71903 charent.xml