Omega — why Bother with Unicode? Robin Fairbairns University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory Pembroke Street Cambridge CB23QG UK Email:
[email protected] Abstract Yannis Haralambous’ and John Plaice’s Omega system employs Unicode as its coding system. This short note (which previously appeared in the UKTUG mag- azine Baskerville volume 5, number 3) considers the rationale behind Unicode itself and behind its adoption for Omega. Introduction and written by Yannis Haralambous (Lille) and John Plaice (Universit´e Laval, Montr´eal). It follows on As almost all T X users who ‘listen to the networks’ E quite naturally from Yannis’ work on exotic lan- at all will know, the Francophone T X users’ group, E guages (see, among many examples, Haralambous, GUTenberg, arranged a meeting in March at CERN 1990; 1991; 1993; 1994), which have always seemed (Geneva) to ‘launch’ Ω. The UKTUG responded to to me to be bedevilled by problems of text encoding. GUTenberg’s plea for support to enable T Xusers E Simply, Ω (the program) is able to read scripts from impoverished countries to attend, by making that are encoded in Unicode (or in some other code the first disbursement from the UKTUG’s newly- that is readily transformable to Unicode), and then established Cathy Booth fund. The meeting was to process them in the same way that T Xdoes. well attended, with representatives from both East- E Parallel work has defined formats for fonts and other ern and Western Europe (including me; I also at- necessary files to deal with the demands arising from tended with UKTUG money), and one representa- AFONT Unicode input, and upgraded versions of MET , tive from Australia (though he is presently resident the virtual font utilities, and so on, have been writ- in Europe, too).