The Omega Typesetting and
Document Processing System  

Introduction

Papers published

The authors

Mailing lists

Road map      

Distributions

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Support

Omega is an extension of TeX developed by John Plaice and Yannis Haralambous. Its first release, aims primarily at improving TeX's multilingual abilities.

When the TeX program was originally developed in the mid seventies by Donald Knuth it was mainly aimed at typeseting mathematical texts in the English language. Since then TeX has made inroads in broader and broader areas of scientific, literary and other scholarly activities in many countries all over the world. In 1991, Knuth froze TeX, mainly in the interest of stability. However, he allows the TeX code to be used as the basis for further developments, so long as the resulting system is distributed under a different name.

In Omega all characters and pointers into data-structures are 16-bit wide, instead of 8-bit, thereby eliminating many of the trivial limitations of TeX. Omega also allows multiple input and output character sets, and uses programmable filters to translate from one encoding to another, to perform contextual analysis, etc. Internally, Omega uses the universal 16-bit Unicode standard character set, based on ISO-10646. These improvements not only make it a lot easier for TeX users to cope with multiple or complex languages, like Arabic, Indic, Khmer, Chinese, Japanese or Korean, in one document, but will also form the basis for future developments in other areas, such as native color support and hypertext features.

The LaTeX format adapted to the special features of Omega is called Lambda.

The standard distribution of Omega also includes a new standard encoding ``TeX Unicode''. This encoding proposes a typographic implementation of the data exchange Unicode standard. Its first part (UT1) covers the Latin, IPA, Greek, Cyrillic alphabets and some dingbats. The second part (UT2) covers right-to-left scripts: currently Arabic, Hebrew and Berberian Tifinagh and later on, Syriac.

Fonts for UT1 (omlgc family) and UT2 (omah family) are under development: these fonts are in PostScript format and visually close to Times and Helvetica font families. A Perl utility creates virtual 16-bit fonts which are used by Omega itself. Utilities such as odvicopy (extended dvicopy) and odvips (extended dvips) disassemble the characters of these fonts into glyphs of the 8-bit PostScript fonts.