Help with OpenOffice BiDi bugs

[Shoshannah Forbes <xslf at xslf dot com>]

Hi all.
I hope this is the right list to post to- I need the help of the Arabic 
speaking community, and was referred here.
I am a QA person, and I test Hebrew/BiDi support in OpenOffice.

As OpenOffice 2.0 is getting close to releasing a beta version, many 
Hebrew bugs where marked as "OOo later" (which means that they won't 
make it into the 2.0 release), I decided together with the company that 
does the Hebrew localization to  compile a list of the most important 
ones, so pressure can be put on Sun in order to get them fixed. I am 
trying to get the community vote (and if possible fix) these bugs, to 
show Sun that there is indeed a need for them to get fixed, even for 
minority languages like ones that need BiDi.

Although I don't know Arabic very well, I suspect that many of these 
affect Arabic as well, as many of them seem to be more BiDi bugs then 
Hebrew ones.

The list is below (original version for Hebrew- not all would apply to 
Arabic).

Thanks for your help!


-- Important Hebrew bugs pushed to "OOo later" --

* http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=14069 -
Problems with placement of Hebrew vowels (nikud | diacritics) in Linux:
In the light of the recent attempts (and even at least one pilot using 
the Kannery's ( http://www.kannery.com )terminal server product) to get 
Linux in the educational system, this is a major strategic bug.

* http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=30631
R2L enabled controls -
This is important for forms, Macros, and esp. the new Database GUI. 
Without this bug fixed, the business uses of OOo in the Hebrew/Arabic 
market are severely limited.

* http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=17514 -
Incorrect letter order / word order when exporting Hebrew as swf 
(flash)-
This feature is one of the strongest selling point for OOo abroad, 
allowing people to create presentations which can be viewed perfectly 
on any machine, without a need for a full (and big) OOo installation. 
It is completely broken for Hebrew.

* http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=16295
directionality lost when exporting a presentation to text-
So you want to export you SlideShow to the 2nd best after Flash, HTML? 
You are in for a bad surprise, and this doesn't work properly as well 
(and you don't want to look at the horrible HTML it created for you...)
There are many more presentation import/export issues, which make very 
hard to use OOo to deal with presentations in a heterogeneous 
environment. Even simple things as keeping the font setting (on the 
same machine!) are broken
(http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=39515 )

* http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=18024
Direction of weak characters: A new method for dealing with text 
direction without using keyboard layout -
The Unicode standard has been updated to support proper directionality 
of runs like "המאה ה-20"- OpenOffice hasn't yet, and this is one of the 
most visible bugs for Hebrew, which affects import as well. And thanks 
to
http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=13091 , we don't even 
have a decent workaround to offer users.

* http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=37911 -
OOo incurrectly doesn't identify David CLM as David-
A bug which should be fairly easy to fix, and that fixing it will 
prevent many many problem. As the version of David that comes with 
current distros is "David CLM", and as David is one of the most 
commonly used fonts, this bug is highly visible.

* http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=10326
When paragraph direction is rtl, numbered list icon is incorrect -
A 3 year old highly visible cosmetic bug, which gives OOo a very bad 
first impression on users.

* http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=30518
brochure printing is always LTR, even when locale/document are RTL -
Yet another major OOo feature that is broken for Hebrew/Arabic.

---
Shoshannah Forbes
http://www.xslf.com