From: Pavel Kolar <kolar@fzu.cz>
Date: Wed, 1 Feb 1995 12:05:33 GMT
Subject:  Omega
Message-Id: <D3BLLA.4q4@nntp-hep.fzu.cz>

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OMEGA, A 16-BIT EXTENSION OF THE TeX SYSTEM

First presentation in world premiere

CERN, Geneva, Switzerland

Thursday March 16th 1995, 9:30-12:30 and 14:00-17:00

CN Amphitheatre (Building 31, 3rd floor)


The TeX program was originally developed in the mid
seventies by Donald Knuth to typeset 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 around the world. In 1991, Knuth froze TeX,
in the interest of stability, among other reasons.
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.

On Thursday, March 16th, 1995, Omega, the first
generally available extended version of TeX, will be
presented to the world at CERN (Geneva, Switzerland).
Omega is an extension of TeX developed by John Plaice
(Universiti Laval, Canada) and Yannis Haralambous
(Lille, France). Its first release aims primarily at
improving TeX's multilingual abilities.

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 will not only make it
a lot easier for TeX users to cope with multiple or
complex languages, like Arab, Indic, Khmer, Chinese, or
Japanese, in one document, but will also form the basis
for future developments in other areas, such as native
color support and hypertext features.

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, Greek, Cyrillic, Armenian, and Georgian
alphabets and its implementation in Computer Modern is
based in part on existing Metafont code prepared by
different national TeX users' groups.  These fonts are
built using the Virtual Metafont mechanism, which
minimizes the number and size of the PK files and
allows the creation of 8-bit DVI files are
de-virtualization.

The presentations will take place at CERN (Geneva,
Switzerland) in the CN Amphitheatre (Bld. 31, 3rd
Floor).  They will start with a general introduction of
the Omega system, explaining how it is or can be
implemented on various computer platforms. Then, the
presentation of examples of high quality typography
will show how the use of the Unicode/ISO 10646
character code makes it easier to handle a complete set
of Cyrillic, Latin, Greek, Arab, Hebrew, and other
characters in one document. At the end of the day a
round-table discussion will allow the participants to
provide input to the Omega team about which features
they would like to see improved or added to the
system. All participants will obtain a free copy of the
software.

More technical discussions between implementors can be
organized for the next day.

This day is sponsored by GUTenberg, the TeX local user
group of the French speaking community.  Other sponsors
would be much appreciated since we would like to invite
as many representatives from different LUGs and
language communities as possible to let everyone
benefit from the possibilities of this new system for
typesetting complex languages.  Please contact Michel
Goossens or Michhle Jouhet (addresses below) for more
details or if you want to book a room in the CERN
hostel.


Michel Goossens, CN Division   goossens@cern.ch
Tel.: (+41 22) 767-3363
fax:  (+41 22) 767-8630

Michhle Jouhet,  AS Division   jouhet@cern.ch
Tel.: (+41 22) 767-2123

CERN European Laboratory for Particle Physics,
CH-1211 Geneva 23, Switzerland

CERN is a member of TUG, CyrTUG, DANTE, GUTenberg, NTG, and UKTeX.


Michel Goossens


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