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