POOLTYPE(1)

💅 pooltype(1) — the manual page, but make it make sense 💅

okay so real talk, this is pooltype from the Web2C corner of the TeX universe. That's the manual name bestie, it's on the tin, we're moving on. 🫶

✨ NAME ✨

pooltype — bestie, it displays a WEB pool file. That's the whole job. 🎀

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

pooltype pool_file

🦋 DESCRIPTION 🦋

okay so the pooltype program takes a string pool file — and to be so clear about it, a program-oriented one — from a WEB (.web) literate program, and translates it into a human-oriented text file. Iconic behavior honestly. 🌸

and like, where do these string pool files come from? tangle(1) writes them, but only when the WEB source uses the double-quoted string feature. tex(1) and mf(1) do that, so iykyk. ✨

the pool_file name has to be complete, no cap. there's no adding of default extensions happening, and there's no path searching happening. you give the whole name or you get nothing. 🙈

🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

lowkey there's not a lot here and that's the vibe:

• for the details of command-line parsing, go see tex(1) — she's the main character for that ✨
• the standard -help and -version options are also supported. yes bestie, the classics. 💅

💀 BUGS 💀

ngl this is the part where it gets a little sad. 😭

finding the correct pool file for a given binary turned out to be a rather unreliable operation. like, genuinely unreliable. 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. that's it. that's the whole pool file economy now. 💀

🌈 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. literally a legend, we stan. 🔥

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

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and that's the page bestie, hope it slayed 💖 this one's Web2C 2026, dated 22 January 2026, and yes there's a POOLTYPE(1) at the top and bottom of the original like a little sandwich, but you got the good version instead 🥪✨