PPWizard

PPWizard is a text macro processor primarily intended to be used for generating HTML and IPF files, but it can be used as a generic preprocessor. PPWizard is written in REXX and is portable between operating systems to a degree but with the exception of IBM operating systems, Amiga systems and Microsoft Windows will require you to install REXX interpreter.

Note that if you are using PPWizard on a modern version of Microsoft Windows, that the Windows installer of the package installs the whole shebang into the Drive:/Program Files/PPWIZARD folder and installs an outdated version of Regina REXX interpreter in the same folder. You are better off by downloading the OS/2 or generic version of the package and installing that somewhere in your userland where you have full read/write access (e.g. drive:/Users/.../Documents/PPwiz for instance) rather than under "Program files", and you should download a recent version of Regina REXX rather than use the bundled one.

Charset support
8 Bit ASCII (256 Characters according to current codepage). No support for Unicode or DBCS.

Version

 * 16.059 (2016-02-28)
 * 17.308 (2017-11-04)

Known issues
PPWizard does not give a correct exit code after it has processed a script, it is almost arbitrary if it flags success or failure, this bug has existed since the late 90s. While this does not affect the manual use of the script it causes problems if you try to use it with other scripts or programs since there is no way of finding out if PPWizard has correctly processed the scripts except by analysing its output and debug files, and if you are writing a script that does such complex processing you might as well write a custom replacement for the script itself.

Author

 * Dennis Bareis

Links

 * http://dennisbareis.com/ppwizard.htm
 * http://gnosis.cx/publish/programming/review_ppwizard.txt
 * https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/PPWIZARD (Forum)