--- FWEB PUBLIC FILES --- Last update: September 23, 1998 FWEB is a literate programming tool that works in conjunction with LaTeX. The concept of literate programming was invented by Donald Knuth, and implemented by him in his original WEB for Pascal, which he used to document TeX. FWEB is based on an early version (0.5) of Silvio Levy's CWEB. The 'F' stands for Fortran (which motivated the initial development), but FWEB now supports multiple-language programming in C, C++, Fortran, Ratfor, and TeX. FWEB is a SPARE-TIME ACTIVITY. It was developed in a quasi-academic environment at the Plasma Physics Laboratory of Princeton University (sponsored by the U.S. Dept. of Energy) in order to support various computational projects in plasma turbulence and fusion research. With continuing cuts in U.S. fusion research funding, that environment and the laboratory are under great pressure. This implies that FWEB support for the foreseeable future will be spotty at best. Suggestions and bug reports are still very welcome; the future direction of FWEB is considerably influenced by these. Unfortunately, because of my primary professional responsibilities I am no longer able to consistently answer questions about how to use FWEB. Please first make a serious attempt to find the answer in the on-line info documentation. If that fails, address questions to the fweb-users mailing list (which, of course, I do read). See NOTICE dated Sept. 25, 1995 below. Please address all correspondence about suggestions and bug reports to krommes@princeton.edu These may not be acknowledged individually, but each one is definitely studied. A companion file READ_ME-?.?? introduces the most recent release in more detail. IMPORTANT NOTICES (most recent first): =============================================================================== NOTICE (September 23, 1998): fweb-1.61 is available from ftp.pppl.gov:/pub/fweb/fweb-1.61.tar.gz. fweb-1.61 is just fweb-1.60 with a variety of bug fixes. Because of extended travel, there may be no support for problems with this release until December, 1998, so upgrade with care. NOTICE (March 18, 1998): The promised release of fweb-1.60 hasn't happened yet. The next shot I have at doing so will be mid-May. Meanwhile, the tar file for fweb-1.53 has been restored. NOTICE (January 9, 1998): ``fweb-1.60'' will soon be available. In preparation, all tar files have been temporarily removed. The `beta' has been removed from 1.60-beta. This version should be robust, and it's probably safe to upgrade. The next planned major release is fweb-2.00, expected around January 1, 2000. NOTICE (January 1, 1998): FAQ disappears The FWEB FAQ, which was an independent user activity, seems to have disappeared. Please consult the on-line documentation. NOTICE (January 1, 1997): ``fweb-1.60-beta'' is available. This version fixes various bugs. It also implements some support for large projects involving multiple web source files. If you are happy with the behavior of your present FWEB installation, I do not recommend that you bother to upgrade just yet. Of course, tests by patient pioneers are always welcome. NOTICE (September 25, 1995): ``Using the FWEB mailing lists'' To learn about the commands you can use with the FWEB mailing lists (see notice below), send a message to `majordomo@pppl' with the single word `help' in the body of the message. Messages sent to the FWEB mailing lists are archived in ftp.pppl.gov:/pub/fweb/archive/fweb-{users,installers}.archive. You can obtain these by sending a message of the form, e.g., `get fweb-users.archive' to `majordomo@pppl.gov', or by anonymous ftp. NOTICE (September 23, 1995): ``fweb-1.53.tar.Z regenerated'' fweb-1.53.tar.Z was regenerated to fix the following minor problems: * The Makefile didn't install fweb.info-7. * A warning about `disgarded const' in style.c (interpreted as an error by some compilers) was removed. * Paths related to the `-H' option weren't always processed correctly. NOTICE (September 22, 1995): ``fweb-1.53 is available'' fweb-1.53 is available, including executable files for the IBM-PC. See READ_ME-1.5x for more details. NOTICE (September 21, 1995): ``Obtaining FWEB information'' The FWEB info documentation is available on the World Wide Web from http://w3.pppl.gov/~krommes/fweb_toc.html The FWEB FAQ is available from http://www.arsc.sunyit.edu/fwebdocs/fweb.html You may subscribe to one or both of the mailing lists `fweb-users' and `fweb-installers'. Send e-mail to `majordomo@pppl.gov'. In the body of the message, say, e.g., subscribe fweb-users NOTICE (May 1, 1995): ``fweb-1.50 is available'' FWEB version 1.50 is available. This is an incremental release in order to provide support for LaTeX2e in native mode. Many, although by no means all, bugs reported with previous releases have been fixed. For more information about v1.50, please see READ_ME-1.50. Version 1.30, which for several years has been declared to be the stable version of choice, is gradually getting out of date. I now recommend that current users try VERY, VERY CAUTIOUSLY to upgrade to v1.50. Don't do that the week before a critical deadline. Because I am currently on research leave (until summer of 1995), FWEB-related time has been very scarce. Therefore, FWEB-1.50 is a somewhat stripped-down version that is missing the collection of demos and voluminous documentation that had accreted over the years, so it may not be appropriate for new users. Demos will be reinstated later as they are upgraded. Documentation is now maintained exclusively in texinfo format. Testing on personal computers and other non-standard machines will eventually be done, but not for at least some months. However, if you have a standard Unix environment, you should not have too many problems. A list of important bugs can be found in READ_ME-1.5x.