NAME¶

aleph - extended TeX with Unicode and bidirectional typesetting support

SYNOPSIS¶

aleph [options] [&format] [ file [ more-input ] | [ \more-input ]

DESCRIPTION¶

Run the Aleph typesetter on file, usually creating file.dvi. If the file argument has no extension, ".tex" will be appended to it. See tex(1) for details of command-line parsing.

Aleph is no longer being actively developed; see LuaTeX for current activity with Unicode and TeX. Aleph is still maintained and distributed for the sake of supporting existing documents.

Aleph is essentially the extended TeX engine Omega, plus the etex(1) extensions. Omega was developed starting in the 1990s to support Unicode and bidirectional typesetting. To support this, it implements "Omega translation process" files (.otp), which are compiled into "Omega compiled process" files (.ocp).

Omega, and hence Aleph, also has its own extended font formats, analogous to TeX's: Omega metric files (.ofm) and Omega virtual fonts (.ovf), along with their corresponding human-readable "property list" forms (.opl and .ovp).

OPTIONS¶

See tex(1). The -enc, -mltex, -translate-file, and -8bit options are not present in Aleph. There are no Aleph-specific options.

ENVIRONMENT¶

See tex(1).

BUGS¶

See tex(1).

FILES¶

$TEXMFMAIN/tex/plain/config/aleph.ini

The driver file that builds the Aleph format file, aleph.fmt, in TeX Live.

SEE ALSO¶

tex(1), luatex(1).
ofm2opl(1), opl2ofm(1), ovf2ovp(1), ovp2ovf(1).
otangle(1), odvicopy(1), odvitype(1).

Aleph package page on CTAN: https://ctan.org/pkg/aleph
Omega package page on CTAN: https://ctan.org/pkg/omega

Clearly, this manual page is a bare minimum. Unfortunately, there is no comprehensive documentation on either Omega or Aleph.

The Web2c (https://tug.org/web2c) and Kpathsea (https://tug.org/kpathsea) manuals have brief mentions of the programs and file formats.

Perhaps most usefully, a number of articles were published in TUGboat on their development and usage, mostly by John Plaice and Yannis Haralambous: https://tug.org/TUGboat.

Other than that, use the source.

AUTHORS¶

TeX was created by Donald E. Knuth. The primary authors of the Aleph enhancements are John Plaice and Yannis Haralambous, as they are the authors of Omega. The e-TeX extensions were primarily written by Peter Breitenlohner, and added to Aleph by Giuseppe Bilotta.

Public discussion list and bug reports: https://lists.tug.org/tex-k