POOLTYPE(1)                 General Commands Manual                POOLTYPE(1)

NAME
       pooltype - display a WEB pool file

SYNOPSIS
       pooltype pool_file

DESCRIPTION
       The 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 tangle(1) when the WEB source
       uses the double-quoted string feature, as tex(1) and mf(1) do.

       The pool_file name must be complete; no adding of default extensions or
       path searching is done.

OPTIONS
       See tex(1) for details of command-line parsing.

       The standard -help and -version options are also supported.

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
       pooltype, apart from the compilation build directory.

SEE ALSO
       tangle(1).

       Package page on CTAN: https://ctan.org/pkg/pooltype
       Section in the Web2c manual:
       https://tug.org/texinfohtml/web2c.html#pooltype-invocation
       Typeset source code, including the string pool file format description:
       https://ctan.org/pkg/knuth-pdf

AUTHORS
       Donald E. Knuth wrote the program and originally ported it to Unix. It
       was published as part of the TeXware technical report from Stanford.

       Public discussion list and bug reports: https://lists.tug.org/tex-k

Web2C 2026                      22 January 2026                    POOLTYPE(1)