[tex-live] Re: antomega [was: Multilingual LaTeX: Greek, English, and UTF-8]

[Alexej Kryukov]

On Wednesday 14 September 2005 06:52, Staszek Wawrykiewicz wrote:
>
> Hmmm... The main problem is that omega, lambda, and even antomega
> still haven't good and *exact* specification. As for distributions
> like teTeX or TL we had always problems which files belong to the
> separate and well distingushed packages, which files were borowed
> and/or changed from each other, etc. We tried our best to clean that
> mess and this problem was often reported on that list (but without
> special reaction).

I am unsure I understood this. Can you explain what do you call "exact
specification"? At least I suppose I do my best to keep antomega as
well distinguished as possible by giving unique names to all my files
and placing them to unique directories. If this is not sufficient,
please tell me what else should be done in order to simplify including
antomega into an official distribution like TL.

> As I see, this document is somehow outdated in regard of the thread
> already discussed here [Omega and the recent changes in TDS], so
> perhaps it would be fine to adapt it to (some) conclussions taken. 

For now, no acceptable solution has been found for the problem I
described in that thread. I am still awaiting an answer from Karl
and others and hope the problem can be resolved soon. May be I
have to initiate a similar discussion in the TDS list too.

> It  is not clear difference between lambda and lambda+antomega (e.g.
> the  later uses specific hyphen.cfg; if so, we need separate
> command/link to invoke antomega). 

Well, antomega can be turned into a separate format if it
is considered necessary. However, I can easily explain the reasons
for which I still haven't made this step:

-- as long as antomega is not available by default in all major 
TeX distributions, any necessity of creating additional links/commands
may make the package installation too complex for an average user.
Of course things may change if antomega ever gets included into TL;

-- the default lambda format (without antomega) should be considered
practically useless anyway. Note that at the old times when Omega had
its own (although imperfect) multilingual support package, it was
distributed with a special version of hyphen.cfg. Since this file is no
longer present in modern distributions, babel's hyphen.cfg usually
gets loaded into format by default. Most commands defined in that
file are not only useless in Omega context, but even explicitly
contradict to principles Omega is based on. 

So antomega just does the job which normally would be performed
by lambda's own texmf stuff if it was not broken. Since I can hardly
imagine anybody who really needs a lambda format with babel's
commands, replacing babel's hyphen.cfg with antomega's file probably
doesn't hurt.

> Can antomega be run with aleph (lamed), which is 
> considered as runable and enough (as the users say) stable omega
> based engine? 

To my surprise, it can't, because processing some of my OCP rules
(absolutely correct to my mind) causes compilation errors! I suppose
this is a bug in aleph, but probably I have to ask in the alpeh mailing
list.

-- 
Regards,
Alexej Kryukov <akrioukov at newmail dot ru>

Moscow State University
Historical Faculty