---
name: "pooltype"
section: "1"
platform: "linux"
package: "texlive-doc"
version: "2026.1-1"
release: "Arch Linux 2026-11-01"
platforms: ["linux"]
url: "https://new.carta.tech/pooltype"
---

# pooltype(1)

display a WEB pool file

## 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)](/tangle/1.md) when the WEB source uses the double-quoted string feature, as [**tex**(1)](/tex/1.md) and [**mf**(1)](/mf/1.md) do.

The *pool\_file* name must be complete; no adding of default extensions or path searching is done.

## OPTIONS

See [**tex**(1)](/tex/1.md) 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)](/tangle/1.md).

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