Status update on e-Omega/Aleph

* Status update on e-Omega/Aleph
@ 2003-09-08 14:43 Giuseppe Bilotta
  2003-09-08 15:07 ` Bill McClain
  0 siblings, 1 reply; 12+ messages in thread
From: Giuseppe Bilotta @ 2003-09-08 14:43 UTC (permalink / raw)

Hello people,

I'd like to inform you on the current status and short-term
forecast for e-Omega.

The current official release is versioned 3.14159--1.15--2.1
(RC1) and is based on Omega 1.15 and e-TeX 2.1; even though it
is just considered a Release Candidate, it's stable enough for
production use. In fact, it has already been successfully used
to publish in mixed-direction context.

There will likely be at least one more release candidate,
to solve a couple of direction-related bug, and probably two
(the second featuring probably mostly a code clean-up).

The e-Omega task force has decided for a name change for the
project. From the first stable release onwards, the project
(and the resulting program) will be called Aleph ($\Aleph$ in
TeX notation).

For those who missed the previous announcements, e-Omega (soon
Aleph) is a user initiative, effectively started in November
2002, to merge two of the most important TeX extensions (Omega
and e-TeX) to ensure that the wonderful enhancements in each
would be readily available to users that need both of them. In
its present state it was presented at the TUG2003 conference in
Hawai`i this july.

The focus of Aleph development is and will be:

* providing a stable and reasonably fast extension to TeX
containing most of the Omega enhancements (support for large
fonts, multiple directions and character coding manipulations
(OTPs/OCPs); the only unavailable feature is the support for
SGML/XML) and many of the e-TeX enhancements (except for the
bidirectional ones, surpassed by the more powerful
multidirectional capabilities of Omega);

* providing a development environment for middle-level users
which would not grow obsolete in the short term, henceforth
ensuring continued support for already-developed OTPs and
similar companion tools;

* providing a development environment for modern format
developers (ConTeXt, and hopefully in the near future a new
LaTeX as well) to support multidirectional typesetting in an
easier-to-handle and more powerful programming environment.

Both in the right-to-left world and in the CJK world work is
already in progress to make sure these points are fully
exploited. Thanks also to the excellent (independently
developed) dvipdfmx DVI-to-PDF converter, support for the
extended features of Omega and e-Omega/Aleph will not come at
the cost of losing the option of easy PDF production (yes, we
all would like to have PDF production directly integrated like
in pdf-TeX, but don't expect that any time soon.)

A note about the new name. Among the many reasons for the
choice of the name there are:

* the origins and purpose of the project: whereas Omega seeks
to eventually offer the definitive answer to virtually all the
problems of multilingual typesetting, Aleph has a more modest
goal: to provide an immediately available and usable step in
that direction. Since Aleph is the first letter of both the
Arabic and the Hebrew alphabet (both of which need the
multidirectional features offered by e-Omega), and as the
project was started thanks to the initiative of Idris S. Hamid
and Alan Hoenig (who are working on Arabic and Hebrew),
choosing such a common name which connotes both "immediate" and
"multilingual" was considered an appropriate choice.

* also, Aleph is used in mathematics to denote transfinite
numbers. This will allow "perverted" autoreferential tricks,
like having a countable first stable release of Aleph
($\Aleph_0$); following major releases will be subsequent
transfinite numbers ($\Aleph_1$, $\Aleph_2$, etc) and minor
improvements/bugfixes will be cardinals ($\Aleph_0+1$,
$\Aleph_0+2$, etc)

A mailing list, graciously hosted by NTG, the Dutch TeX User
Group, is available; its address is aleph at ntg dot nl. Since
it is moderated, please subscribe before sending emails to it.
Instructions on how to subscribe to the list are available at
http://www.ntg.nl/mailman/listinfo/aleph

On behalf of the e-Omega/Aleph task force, I would like to thank
Donald Ervin Knuth for giving us TeX; John Plaice, Yannis
Haralambous and the rest of the Omega folks for their amazing
achievements which gave us such a powerful base on which to
build; Peter Breitenlohner and the NTS team for giving us the
excellent e-TeX; all the distributions' maintainers for
providing easy, integrated, interoperable and up-to-date
systems; and everybody in the TeX community, for making it the
wonderful environment that it is.

My very personal thanks also go to Hans Hagen, Idris Hamid and
Alan Hoenig, for convincing me to put my hands in the project,
and to the distributions' maintainers, in particular Christian
Schenk and Fabrice Popineau, for their essential help and
neverending patience in bearing with a 'programmer' victim of
his background as a mathematician which takes him to submit
patches without testing them "because in theory they should
work", and Olaf Weber and Thomas Esser, for making
e-Omega/Aleph available under Linux as well.

[Copies of this message have been posted to the comp.text.tex
newsgroup and the ConTeXt and Omega mailing lists]

-- 
Giuseppe "Oblomov" Bilotta

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