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<title>UK TeX FAQ -- question label omegaleph</title>
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<h3>Omega and Aleph</h3>
<p/>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.
<p/>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).
<p/>Before that distressing event, a separate thread of development was
started, to produce a program called Aleph
, which merged the facilities of
<a href="FAQ-etex.html">e-TeX</a> 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.
<p/>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.
<p/>The work done in the Aleph project is also being carried forward in
the <a href="FAQ-luatex.html">LuaTeX</a> project.
<p/><p>This question on the Web: <a href="http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=omegaleph">http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=omegaleph</a>
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