.TH POOLTYPE 1 "22 January 2026" "Web2C 2026"
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.\"=====================================================================
.SH NAME
pooltype \- display a WEB pool file
.SH SYNOPSIS
.B pooltype
.I pool_file
.\"=====================================================================
.SH DESCRIPTION
The
.B pooltype
program translates a (program-oriented) string pool file from a WEB
(.web) literate program to a (human-oriented) text file.  Such string
pool files are written by
.BR tangle (1)
when the WEB source uses the double-quoted string feature, as
.BR tex (1)
and
.BR mf (1)
do.
.PP
The
.I pool_file
name must be complete; no adding of default extensions or path searching
is done.
.\"=====================================================================
.SH OPTIONS
See
.BR tex (1)
for details of command-line parsing.
.PP
The standard
.B -help
and
.B -version
options are also supported.
.\"=====================================================================
.SH BUGS
Finding the correct pool file for a given binary turned out to be a
rather unreliable operation. In 2008, Taco Hoekwater and others changed
all the engines to compile the strings in the binary as part of the
compilation. So nowadays there are no pool files on which to run
\fBpooltype\fP, apart from the compilation build directory.
.\"=====================================================================
.SH "SEE ALSO"
.BR tangle (1).
.PP
Package page on CTAN: https://ctan.org/pkg/pooltype
.br
Section in the Web2c manual:
https://tug.org/texinfohtml/web2c.html#pooltype-invocation
.br
Typeset source code, including the string pool file format description:
https://ctan.org/pkg/knuth-pdf
.\"=====================================================================
.SH AUTHORS
Donald E. Knuth wrote the program and originally ported it to Unix. It
was published as part of the
.I \*(OXware
technical report from Stanford.
.PP
Public discussion list and bug reports: https://lists.tug.org/tex-k