aleph(1) General Commands Manual aleph(1)
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
Web2C 2026 15 January 2026 aleph(1)
texlive-bin 2026.78235 - Generated Thu Mar 5 15:27:29 CST 2026