pwebmac – Consolidated WEB macros for DVI, PDF, and HINT output

The original WEB system by Donald Knuth has the macros webmac.tex that produce DVI output only; for historic reasons, they will never be modified (apart from catastrophic errors). Hàn Thế Thành has extended these macros in his (outdated?) pdfwebmac.tex for PDF output (only) with pdfTeX. Jonathan Kew's XeTeX has similar macros xewebmac.tex by Khaled Hosny that include and modify webmac.tex for PDF output; all these macros can only be used with a specific “TeX engine” each.

The present pwebmac package integrates these three WEB macro files similar to cwebmac.tex in Silvio Levy's and Don Knuth's CWEB system, so pwebmac.tex can be used with “plain TeX,” “pdfTeX,” “LuaTeX,” and “XeTeX” alike. And it adds full support for Martin Ruckert's “HiTeX” engine and its HINT output format.

Its initial application is the production of PDF and HINT files for all major WEB programs for “TeX and friends” as distributed in TeX Live. For this purpose, the shell script makeall was whipped together; it provides various command-line options and works around several “quirks” in the WEB sources. The resulting collections of PDF and HINT documents can be browsed in the knuth-pdf and knuth-hint packages.

WEB programmers who want to use pwebmac.tex instead of the default webmac.tex in their programs have to change the first line in the TeX file created by WEAVE (try weave -p). From there, all depends on the “TeX engine” you use: “plain TeX” by default creates DVI output, “plain TeX” with the invocation tex "\let\pdf+\input…", as well as pdftex, luatex, and xetex create PDF output with clickable links and bookmarks (with pdftex and luatex you are advised to apply the “--shell-escape” command-line option in order to avoid an internal miscalculation in the resulting PDF file), and hitex creates HINT output that can be viewed with the hintview program.

The pwebmac package is free software and may be used without constraints.

This is version 5.1 of the pwebmac package — 2025-03-16, Andreas Scherer.