[Aleph] general query

[Firmicus at ankabut.net]

Hi everyone,

I am new to this list, but I have been a longtime subscriber of the 
omega-users list. I dropped out last year for lack of time generally and 
also of patience regarding omega development. More than a year later I 
realize that some interesting things have happened. First of all: even 
though the Omega project is apparently far from being defunct, it does not 
seem very active either, at least _publicly_. The homepage in Bretagne has 
been reactivated a few weeks ago, but the Australian site has been down for 
several months now. Also, the archives of the omega mailing lists 
(available on omega.enstb.org) stop in July 2003. Can someone on this list 
provide some clues on the current state of affairs? [The latest information 
I could gather was the EuroTeX 2004 (Xanthi) paper by Yannis, John and two 
of their doctoral students concerning the C++ reimplementation of the Omega 
engine. I have also read Yannis' and John's 2003 TUGboat paper on Omega and 
OpenType with great interest. The links are 
http://omega.enstb.org/yannis/pdf/xanthi2004.pdf and 
http://omega.enstb.org/yannis/pdf/kyoto2003-2.pdf]

Now to Aleph. On my win2K laptop fpTeX has binaries of both e-Omega 2.1 RC1 
and omega 1.23.2.2. On my Linux machine, teTeX features Omega 1.23.2.1 but 
not e-Omega. Now I would like to experiment with the latest release of 
Aleph (RC4?? but CTAN has RC2), but I would really prefer precompiled 
binaries (either for linux or win32) over a source tarball. Are any 
available at this time? If not, is it known when they might possibly be 
available (either as standalones or as part of distributions)?

Thanks,

François Charette