[pdftex] Re: Omega status/OpenType in pdfTeX

[Hans Hagen]

Geoffrey Alan Washburn wrote:

> Hans Hagen wrote:
>
>> the omega project is more or less ended; an alternative is to use its 
>> clone aleph which also has the etex extensions and is shipped with 
>> tex distributions
>
>
>     Are there plans for integrating Alephs features with pdfTeX's 
> features in some possible future?
>
>>>     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?
>>
>>  
>> open tyep will en dup in pdftex eventually
>
>
>     Is there a plan for how this will work?  Will UTF8 become the 
> default input format or some such?

under investigation, maybe omega-like, (without otp's) or maybe xetex like (in the end xetex (the mac thing) and pdftex may merge; 

the problem si not in utf-8 since tex can handle that quite well, but in the fonts, so the main issue is to go open type (not just big fonts, but also access to features); will take some time because it need to be done well (and xetex learns us that it's not trivial, if only because open type is moving); also, we need a few years to get al tex fonts open type, but that already inprogress (latin modern, kurier, iwona, antikwa etc ship in type-1, ttf and open type);  

Hans 


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