[texhax] Why isn't plain.tex plain.web? What would be the best way to update it?

Reinhard Kotucha reinhard.kotucha at web.de
Thu Aug 22 02:22:31 CEST 2013


On 2013-08-21 at 11:50:10 -0400, William Adams wrote:

 > On Aug 21, 2013, at 11:02 AM, Philip Taylor wrote:
 > 
 > > To answer your subject, as opposed to your body :
 > 
 > Thanks. I was curious more to the philosophy rather than the
 > mechanics (changed the subject to match).
 > 
 > It should be straight-forward enough to rename plain.tex to
 > something else and then use that --- I'm just surprised that it
 > isn't plain.web as a source file (I seem to recall that at some
 > point someone published a literate program version of it,
 > interweaving it w/ the text from _The TeXbook_, but that would run
 > afoul of the copyright / license).

A .web file is the documented source of a Pascal program.  But
plain.tex is a macro package.

tangle tex.web -> tex.p   (the Pascal source of TeX, the program)
weave  tex.web -> tex.tex (the documented source code)

You cannot use Web for TeX macro packages.  Instead you can create a
LaTeX .dtx file.  See

  texdoc doc
  texdoc docstrip

Regards,
  Reinhard

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Reinhard Kotucha                                      Phone: +49-511-3373112
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