[texhax] OpenType / TrueType font

[Karl Berry]

    * how can I use OpenType/TrueType font as the URW fonts?

I'm not sure which URW fonts you mean.  The URW fonts that have been
released freely are available in Type 1 format and have TeX support
already on CTAN (fonts/psfonts).

Mostly, to use OpenType or TrueType you have to convert them into Type 1
first, and chop them up into 256-char-max fonts.  There are several
utilities around for this.  Here are a couple of links:
http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=psfchoice
http://www.radamir.com/tex/ttf-tex.htm
http://ipe.compgeom.org/pdftex.html

Some commercial TeX implementations support TrueType directly, e.g.,
http://truetype.com.

The MacOSX-specific XeTeX supports OpenType through the OS.
http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=xetex

There are a number of development projects for directly supporting
OpenType in standard TeX or Omega, including in pdftex, but I don't
think any have reached fruition.  There are recent TUGboat articles on
the topic.  http://tug.org/TUGboat/

    * what the OMEGA is?

Omega is a TeX extension based on Unicode, allowing 16-bit input.  Thus
it (or a relative) is the most reasonable basis for future OpenType
support.
http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=omega

    * and is there any alternative than OMEGA?

A related project named Aleph combines omega with the etex
extensions and pdftex output.
http://www.tex.ac.uk/cgi-bin/texfaq2html?label=aleph

Perhaps I should mention that enctex (integrated with web2c and included
in the TL 2004 release) supports true UTF-8 input.  Doesn't have
OpenType support, though.
http://www.olsak.net/enctex.html
http://trific.ath.cx/tex-mf/enctex/

There is nothing else released that I know of.

Sorry there is not better news.  We all wish TeX had real support for
OpenType, but it's not a trivial job, obviously, or it would have been
done long ago.  Perhaps others can fill in more details or mention other
projects.

karl