[texhax] Re: [pdftex] Omega status/OpenType in pdfTeX

[Geoffrey Alan Washburn]

William F. Adams wrote:

> On Aug 8, 2005, at 12:50 PM, Geoffrey Alan Washburn wrote:
>
>>     Is there anywhere I can look to find out more about the current 
>> state of Omega?  All the documents on the Omega website seem to be at 
>> least a few years old.
>
> The only update happening of late has been Giuseppe Bilotta's ``Aleph''.
>
> Probably you could use my hack to get OpenType fonts into it (see my 
> presentation at TUG2003)

    Okay, though I guess the question to ask is whether there are plans 
for eventually adding various pdfTeX features to Aleph?  In particular I 
have been using the microtypographic features. 

>>     Alternately are there plans for getting aroung the 256 glyph 
>> limitation (or even better does something already exist) so that I 
>> can use OpenType fonts in pdfTeX without having to carefully write 
>> encodings that split up the character space?
>
> There's been some other discussion, but nothing concrete AFAIK.
>
> As Nelson Beebe noted, XeTeX is the most promising thing currently 
> available, and is quite workable for those who have access to Mac OS X.

    I do, but not everyone I collaborate with does.

> There has been some discussion of making it platform-agnostic by 
> replacing the AAT / Quartz dependency with opensource alternatives, 
> but this is in the earliest of stages thus far.

    That seems like a sensible plan, but I have the same question here, 
are there plans for integrating XeTeX with the features offered by pdfTeX?

-- 
[Geoff Washburn|geoffw at cis.upenn.edu|http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~geoffw/]