Omega and Aleph
Omega was developed as an extension of
TeX, to use with multilingual texts, expressed in a variety of
input encodings. Omega uses 16-bit, Unicode-encoded, characters. It
provides many innovative concepts, notably including the “translation
process” that takes a character stream and transforms it according to
various processes that may be internally specified, or be a separate
program.
While Omega showed a lot of promise at its mid-1990s announcement, its
development was slow, and development was essentially dead by the time
that one of the original developers withdrew (taking with him a bunch
of research students).
Before that distressing event, a separate thread of development was
started, to produce a program called Aleph
, which merged the facilities of
e-TeX into a stable Omega codebase and added other
extensions. Aleph also proved an attractive platform for many people;
but its development, too, has dried up.
The latest news (from EuroTeX 2006) is that development of Omega is
picking up again, in parallel with research into what the (new)
authors consider a rational scheme for supporting TeX-style
typesetting. The new system is to be known as Omega-2
(Omega subscript 2), and is being
designed in a modular fashion so that support of new facilities (such
as use of advanced OpenType fonts) can be added in a relatively
straightforward fashion.
The work done in the Aleph project is also being carried forward in
the LuaTeX project.
This question on the Web: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=omegaleph