Omega is an extension of the

TeX Tex may refer to: People and fictional characters * Tex (nickname), a list of people and fictional characters with the nickname * Joe Tex (1933–1982), stage name of American soul singer Joseph Arrington Jr. Entertainment * ''Tex'', the Italian ...

typesetting system that uses the

Basic Multilingual Plane In the Unicode standard, a plane is a continuous group of 65,536 (216) code points. There are 17 planes, identified by the numbers 0 to 16, which corresponds with the possible values 00–1016 of the first two positions in six position hexadecimal ...

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...

. 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 Tex may refer to: People and fictional characters * Tex (nickname), a list of people and fictional characters with the nickname * Joe Tex (1933–1982), stage name of American soul singer Joseph Arrington Jr. Entertainment * ''Tex'', the Italian ...

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

LaTeX Latex is an emulsion (stable dispersion) of polymer microparticles in water. Latexes are found in nature, but synthetic latexes are common as well. In nature, latex is found as a milky fluid found in 10% of all flowering plants (angiosperms ...

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 TeX Live is a cross-platform, free software distribution for the TeX typesetting system that includes major TeX-related programs, macro packages, and fonts. It is the replacement of its no-longer supported counterpart teTeX. It is now the defau ...

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 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 TeX Live distribution as a successor to pdfTeX (itself an extension of ε-TeX, ...

, a new project initially funded by

Colorado State University Colorado State University (Colorado State or CSU) is a public land-grant research university in Fort Collins, Colorado. It is the flagship university of the Colorado State University System. Colorado State University is classified among "R1: ...

(through the Oriental TeX Project by Idris Samawi Hamid) and NTG.

started in 2006 and released the first beta version in Summer 2007. It will be a successor of both Aleph and

pdfTeX __NOTOC__ 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 In ...

, using

Lua Lua or LUA may refer to: Science and technology * Lua (programming language) * Latvia University of Agriculture * Last universal ancestor, in evolution Ethnicity and language * Lua people, of Laos * Lawa people, of Thailand sometimes referred t ...

as an integrated lightweight programming language. It is developed primarily by

Taco Hoekwater A taco (, , ) is a traditional Mexican food consisting of a small hand-sized corn- or wheat-based tortilla topped with a filling. The tortilla is then folded around the filling and eaten by hand. A taco can be made with a variety of filling ...

External links

Omega home page

TeX FAQ entry on Aleph and Omega

Mailing list for Omega

Mailing list for Aleph
{{TeX navbox TeX Unicode

Aleph and LuaTeX

See also

External links