Omega is an extension of the TeX typesetting system that uses the Basic Multilingual Plane of Unicode. It was authored by John Plaice and Yannis Haralambous after TeX development was frozen in 1991,[citation needed] 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.
TeX, stylized within the system as TeX, is a typesetting system which was designed and mostly written by Donald Knuth and released in 1978. TeX is a popular means of typesetting complex mathematical formulae; it has been noted as one of the most sophisticated digital typographical systems.
Unicode is a computing industry standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard is maintained by the Unicode Consortium, and as of March 2019 the most recent version, Unicode 12.0, contains a repertoire of 137,993 characters covering 150 modern and historic scripts, as well as multiple symbol sets and emoji. The character repertoire of the Unicode Standard is synchronized with ISO/IEC 10646, and both are code-for-code identical.
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.
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, a new project initially funded by Colorado State University (through the Oriental TeX Project by Idris Samawi Hamid) and NTG. LuaTeX started in 2006 and released the first beta version in Summer 2007. It will be a successor of both Aleph and pdfTeX, using Lua as an integrated lightweight programming language. It is developed primarily by Taco Hoekwater.
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. The project was originally sponsored by the Oriental TeX project, founded by Idris Samawi Hamid, Hans Hagen, and Taco Hoekwater.
Colorado State University is a public research university in Fort Collins, Colorado. The university is the state's land grant university and the flagship university of the Colorado State University System.
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, Czech Republic. The idea of making this extension to TeX was conceived during the early 1990s, when Jiří Zlatuška and Phil Taylor discussed some developmental ideas with Donald Knuth at Stanford University. Knuth later met Hàn Thế Thành in Brno during his visit to the Faculty of Informatics to receive an honorary doctorate from Masaryk University.
See also
XeTeX and LuaTeX for recent Unicode capable TeX extensions.
XeTeX is a TeX typesetting engine using Unicode and supporting modern font technologies such as OpenType, Graphite and Apple Advanced Typography (AAT). It was originally written by Jonathan Kew and is distributed under the X11 free software license.
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LaTeX is a document preparation system. When writing, the writer uses plain text as opposed to the formatted text found in WYSIWYG word processors like Microsoft Word, LibreOffice Writer and Apple Pages. The writer uses markup tagging conventions to define the general structure of a document, to stylise text throughout a document, and to add citations and cross-references. A TeX distribution such as TeX Live or MikTeX is used to produce an output file suitable for printing or digital distribution. Within the typesetting system, its name is stylised as LaTeX.
Blackboard bold is a typeface style that is often used for certain symbols in mathematical texts, in which certain lines of the symbol are doubled. The symbols usually denote number sets. One way of producing blackboard bold is to double-strike a character with a small offset on a typewriter. Thus they are also referred to as double struck.
Typesetting is the composition of text by means of arranging physical types or the digital equivalents. Stored letters and other symbols are retrieved and ordered according to a language's orthography for visual display. Typesetting requires one or more fonts. One significant effect of typesetting was that authorship of works could be spotted more easily, making it difficult for copiers who have not gained permission.
OpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. It was built on its predecessor TrueType, retaining TrueType's basic structure and adding many intricate data structures for prescribing typographic behavior. OpenType is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation.
BibTeX is reference management software for formatting lists of references. The BibTeX tool is typically used together with the LaTeX document preparation system. Within the typesetting system, its name is styled as
. The name is a portmanteau of the word bibliography and the name of the TeX typesetting software.
In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more graphemes or letters are joined as a single glyph. An example is the character æ as used in English, in which the letters a and e are joined. The common ampersand (&) developed from a ligature in which the handwritten Latin letters e and t were combined.
Computer Modern is the original family of typefaces used by the typesetting program TeX. It was created by Donald Knuth with his Metafont program, and was most recently updated in 1992. Computer Modern, or variants of it, remains very widely used in scientific publishing, especially in disciplines that make frequent use of mathematical notation.
ConTeXt is a general-purpose document processor. It is especially suited for structured documents, automated document production, very fine typography, and multi-lingual typesetting. It is based in part on the TeX typesetting system, and uses a document markup language for manuscript preparation. The typographical and automated capabilities of ConTeXt are extensive, including interfaces for handling microtypography, multiple footnotes and footnote classes, and manipulating OpenType fonts and features. Moreover, it offers extensive support for colors, backgrounds, hyperlinks, presentations, figure-text integration, and conditional compilation. It gives the user extensive control over formatting while making it easy to create new layouts and styles without learning the low-level TeX macro language.
FontForge is a font editor which supports many common font formats. Developed primarily by George Williams until 2012, FontForge is free software and is distributed under a mix of the GNU General Public License Version 3 and the 3-clause BSD license. It is available for operating systems including Linux, Windows and macOS and is localized into 12 languages.
Cambria is a transitional serif typeface commissioned by Microsoft and distributed with Windows and Office. It was designed by Dutch typeface designer Jelle Bosma in 2004, with input from Steve Matteson and Robin Nicholas. It is intended as a serif font that is suitable for body text, that is very readable printed small or displayed on a low-resolution screen and has even spacing and proportions.
WinEdt is a shareware Unicode (UTF-8) editor and shell for Microsoft Windows. It is primarily used for the creation of TeX documents, but can also be used to edit HTML or any other type of text file. It can be configured to run as a front-end for a variety of TeX systems, including MiKTeX, fpTeX and TeX Live. WinEdt's highlighting schemes can be customized for different modes and its spell checking functionality supports multi-lingual setups, with dictionaries (word-lists) for many languages available for downloading from WinEdt's Community Site. It supports DVI and PDF workflow.
The Cork encoding is a character encoding used for encoding glyphs in fonts. It is named after the city of Cork in Ireland, where during a TeX Users Group (TUG) conference in 1990 a new encoding was introduced for LaTeX. It contains 256 characters supporting most west and east-European languages with the Latin alphabet.
Asana-Math is a Palatino-like OpenType mathematical font with advanced layout features based on the undocumented Microsoft mathematical OpenType layout extensions. It was developed by Apostolos Syropoulos, based on the Type 1 pxfonts by Young Ryu. Asana-Math is freely available under the Open Font License. The word Asana in the Doric dialect is the name of the Greek mythological goddess Athena.
In digital typography, the New Typesetting System (NTS) is a discontinued reimplementation of the typesetting system TeX in Java. The specific aims of the project were to continue the tradition of Donald Knuth's TeX by providing a first-class typesetting software which is both portable and available free of charge. But whereas TeX is now frozen due to maximum stability, NTS was intended to remain flexible and extensible.
The XITS font project is an OpenType implementation of STIX fonts version 1.x with math support for mathematical and scientific publishing. The main mission of the Times-like XITS typeface is to provide a version of STIX fonts enriched with the OpenType MATH extension.
