Omega (TeX)
Encyclopedia
Omega is an extension of the TeX
TeX
TeX is a typesetting system designed and mostly written by Donald Knuth and released in 1978. Within the typesetting system, its name is formatted as ....

 typesetting system that uses the Basic Multilingual Plane of Unicode
Unicode
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems...

. It was authored by John Plaice and Yannis Haralambous after TeX development was frozen in 1991, primarily to enhance TeX's multilingual typesetting abilities. It includes a new 16-bit font encoding for TeX, as well as fonts (omlgc and omah) covering a wide range of alphabets.

At the 2004 TeX Users Group conference, Plaice announced his decision to split off a new project (not yet public), while Haralambous continued to work on Omega proper.

LaTeX
LaTeX
LaTeX is a document markup language and document preparation system for the TeX typesetting program. Within the typesetting system, its name is styled as . The term LaTeX refers only to the language in which documents are written, not to the editor used to write those documents. In order to...

 for Omega is invoked as lambda.

Aleph and LuaTeX

Although the project seemed very promising from the beginning, the development has been slow and the functionality rather unstable. A separate project was started with the goal of stabilizing the code and extending it with e-TeX functionality, known as Aleph, and led by Giuseppe Bilotta.

The LaTeX for Aleph is known as Lamed.

Aleph alone is not being developed any more, but most of its functionality has been integrated into LuaTeX
LuaTeX
LuaTeX is a TeX based computer typesetting system which started as a version of pdfTeX with a Lua scripting engine embedded. After some experiments it was adopted by the pdfTeX team as a successor to pdfTeX . Later in the project some functionality of Aleph was included...

, a new project initially funded by Colorado State University
Colorado State University
Colorado State University is a public research university located in Fort Collins, Colorado. The university is the state's land grant university, and the flagship university of the Colorado State University System.The enrollment is approximately 29,932 students, including resident and...

 (through the Oriental TeX Project by Idris Samawi Hamid) and NTG. LuaTeX
LuaTeX
LuaTeX is a TeX based computer typesetting system which started as a version of pdfTeX with a Lua scripting engine embedded. After some experiments it was adopted by the pdfTeX team as a successor to pdfTeX . Later in the project some functionality of Aleph was included...

 started in 2006 and released the first beta version in Summer 2007. It will be a successor of both Aleph and pdfTeX
PdfTeX
The computer program pdfTeX is an extension of Knuth's typesetting program TeX, and was originally written and developed into a publicly usable product by Hàn Thế Thành as a part of the work for his PhD thesis at the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University, Brno...

, using Lua as an integrated lightweight programming language. It is developed primarily by Taco Hoekwater.

External links

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