Re: [Fwd: Weak characters handling in OO]

[M Elzubeir <zubeir at gmail dot com>]

> Hi All,
> 
> in the successor of OO.org 2.0 we must address the issue of the
> direction of weak characters.
> This mail refers to IssueZilla issue 18024.
> 
> for the moment we have to options to deal with the direction of weak
> characters in OO.org's next release (after 2.0)
> 
> 1. Behave like MS Office does and determine the direction by reading out
> the locale of IME used to input the weak character. So any weak
> character input with a R2L locale will be R2L and vice versa.
> 
> Pros:
> o 100% compatibility with MS Office documents that use BiDi text.
> o Same behaviour like MS Office on BiDi text when inputting
> 
> Cons:
> o Currently only Windows IME report their locale, Unix' IMEs don't.
>   Result: OO.org for Windows will behave differently to OO.org for
>           Unix
> o Apparently the MS Office method is not correct under all circum-
>   stances, so we will copy MS bugs into OO.org

I don't find enough good to follow MS in this case. The cons of not
behaving the same way under different platforms is far worse than
anything else.

> 
> 2. Behave like suggested in issues 18024 by introducing a modification
> to the Unicode standard.
> 
> Pros:
> o Better and more correct input on weak characters, beating MS Office
> o Being independent from IME capabilities since no read-out is necessary
> 
> Cons:
> o Not compaible to MS Office file format
> o Not compatible to MS Office input
> 
> [..]
> 

I am for this method. Let us put it this way, no matter what we do,
there will be some form of inconvenience. This inconvenience can
either be at the platform level or at the level of different format
compatibility. Since there is no way one can guarantee format
compatibility (and despite the fact that OOo's import/export of
MS-Offce documents being quite decent) it seems only logical to shift
the issue on that side.

In fact, it might even be beneficial to do it this way. Let us say
that I am a user and I only want to edit things using the MS way, then
I would save my files in .doc format and continue to edit my
document(s) in the same fashion I would have under MS Office.

Regards,
Mohammed Elzubeir



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