Re: Article on native language project

[M Elzubeir <zubeir at gmail dot com>]

On Wed, 13 Oct 2004 16:16:40 +0100, Ingrid Marson
<ingrid dot marson at zdnet dot co dot uk> wrote:
> 
> * When was first version of OpenOffice in Hebrew released?

I think the Hebrew team would be better suited for this question. It
is the equivalent of asking the Chinese team when the Estonian version
was released -- they wouldn't normally know ;)

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

Hrmm.. again, this sounds like something to direct to OOo developers.
Ie. any answer you receive on this one would be a proxied one from OOo
developers. So, best to ask them directly.

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

There are no 'issues' with joining. What was said was that the main
difference between the Arabic language and Hebrew language is the fact
that Arabic requires you to shape/join letters in a word (ie. the
shape of each character in a word is contextual). So in addition to
everything Hebrew requires to be supported in an application, Arabic
requires shaping.

> * 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?

Generally, anything that has the word 'RTL' in it affects us both the
same way. However, I beg to differ with him and I think it is a matter
of opinion. It is 'different' and I personally find it easier to deal
with Arabic under OOo than it is under MS Office. Mostly because I am
able to force the direction in some instances. Others may have
different experiences.

> * 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?
> 

I think he hasn't configured his application properly then ;) You can
change the default to right or left for a given document or for every
time you run OOo. In fact, this is one of the big things I like about
OOo. With MS-Office, it magically decides that you want to always have
it default to the right the minute you open an Arabic document. I
failed to figure out how to get it back to left. With OOo, it was
rather clear and simple.


We look forward to reading your finish article ;)

Regards
-- 
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| Mohammed Elzubeir    | Visit us at:                 |
|                      |  http://www.arabeyes.org/    |
| Arabeyes Project     | Homepage:                    |
| Unix the 'right' way |  http://elzubeir.openius.com/|
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