\title{Omega: an extension of the \TeX\ System.
  March 16th, CERN}
\author[Michel Goossens]{Dr. Michel Goossens\\
CN Division, CERN\\
CH-1211 Geneva 23, \\Switzerland\\
\emph{Phone:} (+41 22) 767-3363, \emph{Email:} \texttt{goossens@cern.ch}}
\begin{article}
\begin{multicols}{2}
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.

The $\Omega$ package is an extension of \TeX\ developed by John
Plaice (Universit\'e Laval, Canada) and Yannis
Haralambous (Lille, France). Its first release,
currently under beta-test, aims primarily at
improving \TeX's multilingual abilities.

On Thursday, March 16th, 1995, $\Omega$, the first
generally available extended version of \TeX, will
be presented to the world at CERN (Geneva,
Switzerland). 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
to the other. Internally, $\Omega$ uses the
universal 16-bit Unicode standard character set.
These improvements will not only make it a lot
easier for \TeX\ users to cope with multiple or
complex languages (e.g., Khmer, Arab, Indic,
Chinese, 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 the Unicode \TeX\ 
encoding, a new standard font encoding that is a superset of Unicode
for --- at this moment --- the Latin, Greek, Cyrillic and Arabic
character sets. The first font using this encoding, Universal Computer
Modern, is based on existing \MF\ code prepared by different national
\TeX\ users' groups. The UCM font is built using the Virtual \MF\ 
mechanism, which ensures that users can use the alphabets that they
need without having to manipulate huge files.

The presentations on the 16th of March will take place 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 to take home with
them. 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.  

Information about $\Omega$ can be found in the Proceedings of the 1994
TUG Conference, \emph{TUGboat} 15(3).  Contact TUG at
\texttt{tug@tug.org} for ordering these (over 240 page) proceedings if
you are not (yet) a member of TUG.  A somewhat updated version of the
same material appeared in the Proceedings of the 8th European \TeX\ 
Conference in Gdansk, which
can be obtained by sending 15 DM (postage included) to 
\begin{quote}
W{\l}odek Bzyl, 
Instytut Matematyki, 
Uniwersytet Gda\'nski, 
Wita Stwosza 57, 
PL 80-952, Poland.
\end{quote}

To register for the $\Omega$ day, or to receive further details, contact the
author.

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