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Hàn Thế Thành has extended these macros in his (outdated?)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 5.0 of the pwebmac package — 2024-08-12, Andreas Scherer.