Aleph

[Karl Berry]

Hi Joseph,

    I notice that TL continues to build the Aleph format: does anyone know 
    if this is useful today?

I wouldn't expect (m)any new documents to be written for Aleph, but it
is necessary any existing Omega and Aleph documents. There are certainly
some of those, e.g., I know Yannis himself has quite a few :). So I
would not want to gratuitiously drop it. As far as I know it's not
hurting anything ...

If anyone is curious as to what it is -- Omega was the first engine with
native Unicode support. Aleph primarily added the e-tex extensions to
Omega. Aleph is compatible with Omega, so many years ago, Peter
Breitenlohner and I proposed to Yannis to only maintain Aleph (for
critical bug fixes / system changes / etc.) going forward, and drop the
"omega" binary, to reduce the maintenance burden a little. Yannis was ok
with that.
https://ctan.org/pkg/aleph
https://ctan.org/pkg/omega

Best,
Karl