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)