RE: Article on native language project

["Ingrid Marson" <Ingrid dot marson at zdnet dot co dot uk>]

Thanks for your help Munzir, that's very useful. I have a few other
questions:

* When was first version of OpenOffice in Hebrew released? 

* What features are due in the next major release (2.0) of OpenOffice in
January 2005?

* You said there are issues about shaping/joining - what technical
problems does this present?

* I spoke to Jonathan Ben Avraham, a developer on the Hebrew native
language project and he told me that he believes that Hebrew OpenOffice
is about a year or two behind Microsoft in terms of support for RTL
languages. Is Arab OpenOffice at the same stage?

* He also spoke of the difficulty of document assumptions in terms of
RTL languages eg. the cursor being placed on left by default. Has the
Arab team dealt with any of these issues? 

Thanks again for your help Munzir. I will send you a link to the article
when I have completed it!

Regards,

Ingrid

-----Original Message-----
From: Munzir Taha [mailto:munzirtaha at newhorizons dot com dot sa] 
Sent: 13 October 2004 06:43
To: general at arabeyes dot org
Cc: Ingrid Marson
Subject: Re: Article on native language project

On Yau al-Thulatha 27 Sha`ban 1425 04:06 am, Ingrid Marson wrote:
> That's right - I'm interested in what the project has achieved so far,
> in  current technical issues you face and in what way development has
> been assisted by working together with the Hebrew language team.

Achievements:
------------------
The project has begun as a translation effort. Arabeyes via Anmar Oueja,

leader of the Arabic localization effort, has initiated the importing
and 
conversion of the original SGI files to .po files. The translation is
then 
completed through arabeyes.org via a team from King Abdul Aziz City for 
Science and Technology (KACST) at Saudi Arabia. To my good luck I was
the 
leader of the team that time. Without the very generous help of Mr.
Pavel 
Janik, an open-source consultant and leader of the Czech team at 
OpenOffice.org (http://blog.janik.cz/), who resolved all the issues we
met 
across (localization tools, JCA, builds, ...), we woudn't be able to do
the 
job properly. We reached a 100% translation which is now available with
the 
new version 1.1.3. During the testing face, we reviewed the translation
vai 7 
different builds for Linux and Windows which you can see here:
ftp://ftp.linux.cz/pub/localization/OpenOffice.org/devel/1.1.3

Screenshots can be found here:
http://art.arabeyes.org/OOo?newlang=en_US
Courtesy of Pavel Janik

Technical issues:
--------------------
This is a very important topic. OO.o is still facing many issues with
regard 
to Arabic support. You can find 15 important issues at 
http://wiki.arabeyes.org/OpenBugs in the OOo section. There are other
issues 
which is not reported yet. Without resolving those issues, I dare say
OO.o is 
not very useful for serious work for the Arabic communtiy.
Unfortunately, the 
problem seems to be with very few developers who work to resolve those 
issues. Some of the issues are delayed to 2.0 milestone and some even
lator.

Arabic and Hebrew:
-------------------------
In terms of Bidirectional support Arabic and Hebrew face the same
problems 
which is good since a problem solved for one language would
automatically 
serve the other language support. Still, Arabic faces more challenges
like 
shaping/joining which is not needed for Hebrew.


Finally:
With the many marketing ambitions revealed by OOo, I want to say the
best 
marketing plan to push this open-source suite is to resolve those
issues. 
Please, let us know if this info is not enough or you need something
more 
specific.

-- 
Munzir Taha  PGP Key available
gpg --recv-keys --keyserver www.mandrakesecure.net F0671821

Telecommunications and Electronics Engineer
Mandrake Club Member
Maintainer of the Open Arabic Bugs Project at
http://wiki.arabeyes.org/OpenBugs
Maintainer of Fedora Arabic Translation Project
CIW Designer, ICDL, MOUS, Linux+, LPI 101
New Horizons CLC, Riyadh, SA