Omega is a version of the TeX program modified for multilingual typesetting. It uses unicode, and has additional primitives for (among other things) bidirectional typesetting.

The iniomega and viromega commands are Omega's analogues to the initex and virtex commands. In this installation, they are symlinks to the omega executable.

Omega's command line options are similar to those of TeX.

Omega is experimental software.

--oft format

Use format as the name of the format to be used, instead of the name by which Omega was called or a %& line.

-halt-on-error

Exit with an error code when an error is encountered during processing.

--help

Print help message and exit.

--ini

Be iniomega, for dumping formats; this is implicitly true if the program is called as iniomega.

--interaction mode

Sets the interaction mode. The mode can be one of batchmode, nonstopmode, scrollmode, and errorstopmode. The meaning of these modes is the same as that of the corresponding \commands.

--ipc

Send DVI output to a socket as well as the usual output file. Whether this option is available is the choice of the installer.

--ipc-start

As --ipc, and starts the server at the other end as well. Whether this option is available is the choice of the installer.

--kpathsea-debug bitmask

Sets path searching debugging flags according to the bitmask. See the Kpathsea manual for details.

--maketex fmt

Enable mktexfmt, where fmt must be one of tex or tfm.

--no-maketex fmt

Disable mktexfmt, where fmt must be one of tex or tfm.

--output-comment string

Use string for the DVI file comment instead of the date.

-output-directory directory

directory instead of the current directory. Look up input files in directory first, the along the normal search path.

--parse-first-line

If the first line of the main input file begins with %& parse it to look for a dump name.

--progname name

Pretend to be program name. This affects both the format used and the search paths.

--recorder

Enable the filename recorder. This leaves a trace of the files opened for input and output in a file with extension .ofl. (This option is always on.)

--shell-escape

Enable the \write18{command} construct. The command can be any Bourne shell command. This construct is normally disallowed for security reasons.

--version

Print version information and exit.

One caveat: In most Omega formats, you cannot use ~ in a filename you give directly to Omega, because ~ is an active character, and hence is expanded, not taken as part of the filename. Other programs, such as Metafont, do not have this problem.

TEXMFOUTPUT

Normally, Omega puts its output files in the current directory. If any output file cannot be opened there, it tries to open it in the directory specified in the environment variable TEXMFOUTPUT. There is no default value for that variable. For example, if you say tex paper and the current directory is not writable, if TEXMFOUTPUT has the value /tmp, Omega attempts to create /tmp/paper.log (and /tmp/paper.dvi, if any output is produced.)

TEXINPUTS

Search path for \input and \openin files. This should probably start with ``.'', so that user files are found before system files. An empty path component will be replaced with the paths defined in the texmf.cnf file. For example, set TEXINPUTS to ".:/home/usr/tex:" to prepend the current direcory and ``/home/user/tex'' to the standard search path.

TEXEDIT

Command template for switching to editor. The default, usually vi, is set when Omega is compiled.

omega.pool

Encoded text of Omega's messages.

*.oft

Predigested Omega format (.oft) files.

This version of Omega fails to trap arithmetic overflow when dimensions are added or subtracted. Cases where this occurs are rare, but when it does the generated DVI file will be invalid.

The DVI files produced by Omega may use extensions which make them incompatible with most software designed to handle DVI files. In order to print or preview them, you should use odvips to generate a PostScript file.

Omega is experimental software, and if you are an active user it is strongly recommended that you subscribe to the Omega mailing list. Visit the Omega website for information on how to subscribe.