Japanese support for the Omega typesetting system

October 26, 1999: v0.0001

Contents

Warning -- please read carefully!

Overview

Requirements

Download

Related Projects

Warning

Overview

Omega is an internationalized version of the TeX typesetting system. Although standard TeX gives excellent results in typesetting English and Western European languages, it is poorly suited to languages with large character sets (such as Japanese) and those with unusually complex typesetting rules (such as Arabic). Omega uses Unicode as its base character set, which means that in theory it can accommodate all modern writing systems. It uses external modules called Omega Translation Processes (OTPs) to convert characters from one encoding to another, provide typesetting rules, and otherwise extend the program's capabilities. Omega-J is an effort to provide Japanese language support for Omega. It consists of one or more OTPs, some test documents, and data files and scripts to help you prepare fonts. It is in a very early stage of development, and I am making it available for testing purposes only. Current capabilities are:

• You can process a test document in ISO-2022-JP encoding. The correct kanji will appear in the correct order in the resulting DVI file; ASCII/JIS-Roman characters may or may not appear, depending on the construction of the source file.

You need not be an Omega expert to use this package, but you should at least be familiar with TeX. For more info about TeX and Omega, visit the TeX Users' Group website.

Requirements

Operating system:

TeX and Omega are available for most operating systems, including Windows, MacOS, OS/2, and most or all flavors of UNIX. Some of the tools and instructions in this package are specific to the Linux operating system.

Software packages:

TeX

If you need any explanation about TeX, I don't encourage you to try Omega-J in its current state.

Omega

Recent TeX distributions such as teTeX 1.0 include Omega, so you may already have it installed. If not, you can obtain it from your nearest CTAN archive. For a partial list of CTAN sites, see http://www.tug.org/ .

Freetype

An open source Truetype font rendering library. For more info, visit the Freetype Project. Please pay attention to the legalistic warnings.

ttf2tfm & ttf2pk

If you use a TrueType font as per these instructions, you need ttf2tfm to prepare font metric files and ttf2pk to generate bitmap fonts for the output documents. These two programs are part of the Freetype project, but are not normally included in binary distributions. So you'll probably need to obtain the Freetype source code and compile these tools yourself.

Python

The package includes one or more Python scripts that are optional, but may save you a lot of work. If you don't have a Python interpreter installed, you can find one at The Python Language Website.

Download

UNIX/Linux: omega-j-0.0001.tar.gz [229kb]

Related Projects

When I posted this page last October, I wasn't sure if anyone would be interested -- since there are localized versions of Tex for Japan, and the demand for Japanese typesetting capability is limited in other parts of the world.

Recently, however, I was happy to see several postings to the Omega users' mailing list which announced similar (and perhaps better) projects in Japan. Please have a look at them also.

Hideyuki Suzuki of the University of Tokyo has created an improved injis.otp file . He has also posted a page of information (Japanese only).

Ichiro Matsuda of Science University of Tokyo has created OTPs for EUC and Shift-JIS encoding. They are available at http://itohws03.ee.noda.sut.ac.jp/~matsuda/omega-j/ along with my injis.otp.

Dr. A. Kakuto is pursuing a third project (English). Unfortunately, I was unable to connect to this link on Jan. 5, 2000.