OpenOffice & Arabic

[Nadim Shaikli <shaikli at yahoo dot com>]

With the recent post about OpenOffice on linuxtoday - I think we
should relook into this subject again and try to do something to
finally get proper Arabic/Bidi inclusion.

I know that there was a patch created by IBM that was rejected due
to license issues and such (the patch's "Bidi Architect" Matitiahu
Allouche (matial -at- il.ibm.com) noted in mid May, "there [seems
to be] a misunderstanding between IBM and Sun regarding reception
of a copyright agreement"); the patch is attainable at,

  http://www.bitbuilder.com/bins/ooa.tgz
  http://iglu.org.il/pub/Hebrew/OpenOffice/

This patch/work is not mentioned on OpenOffice.org's website.  The only
Bidi (and Arabic) mentions are as follows,

 + There is a Bidi FAQ

     http://sw.openoffice.org/drafts/BiDiLayout.html

 + The "To-Do" list notes "Cristof Pintaske" (dev -at- gsl.openoffice.org)
   as being in charge of the 'Graphic System Layer' which encompasses Bidi

 + The 'dev' mailing-list notes a thread 'Bidi support for SW' (July 2001)
   in which Lina Kemmel notes IBM's intentions to work on this topic

     http://sw.openoffice.org/servlets/ProjectMailingListList

 + There was a group of Tunisian students (as posted on Arabeyes) that was
   working on arabizing the interface (localization/i18n work) - yet, I'm
   not sure if they are in contact with anyone; they are not noted on
   OpenOffice's localization page either.

     http://l10n.openoffice.org/

Any comments before contacting Mati and OpenOffice's mailing-lists
regarding this topic ?  It seems like a shame to simply drop this patch
due to some bureaucracy/misunderstanding without at least a fight ;-)

Thoughts/suggestions/contacts/links ?

Salam.

 - Nadim


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