### Omega and Aleph

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.

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).

Before that distressing event, a separate thread of development was started, to produce a program called Aleph , which merged the facilities of e-TeX 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.

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.

The work done in the Aleph project is also being carried forward in the LUATeX project.

This question on the Web: http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=omegaleph