Re: Article on native language project

[Jonathan Ben Avraham <yba at tkos dot co dot il>]

Hi Ingrid, Mohammed,
Please see inline comments below...

On Thu, 14 Oct 2004, M Elzubeir wrote:

> 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 ;)

TkOS release the first Hebrew version of OOo (1.1.0) in January 2004.
There were a few "beta" versions that we provided at various conferences
starting from April 2003.

The first Arabic version was produced on 2001 by managed by Magdy Abdel
Koddous <magdy dot abdel dot koddous at SUN dot Com>. Magdy was immensely helpful to us
in importing the "SDF" file, an older technology for translations than
what OOo has today.

In the above, when I say Arabic or Hebrew, I mean menu translations and
localized installation options.

[snip]
> > * 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.

Arabic text joining ("rabt") is handled by the fonts and the FreeTypeII
text shaping engine used by OOo on non-MS Windows platforms and by
uniscribe.dll on MS Windows. There is nothing that OOo has to do to handle
the joining.

The major differences between Arabic and Hebrew in OOo are:

1. Spell checker
2. Calendar and date format
3. "Shaping" of Arabic numbers
4. Installation options such as language and default fonts
5. Canned texts such as fax form, resume, memo

>
> > * 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.

There is a misunderstanding here. Mohammed is correct in pointing out that
OOo handles bidi text, whether Arabic or Hebrew in a more convenient way
that MS Office, with one or two exceptions, such as Issuezilla 18024.
However, OOo still has immense problems with RTL, both Arabic and Hebrew.
For example:

1. OOo Calc is onlt LTR!
Waleed and Falko produced and excellent requirements spec for dealing with
this and you can see the results already in the 2.0 development builds.
There is still a way to go on this though.

2. Object layout in OOo is essentially LTR. There is a section of code
called "miserable RTL hack" that provides some degree of support that Alan
Yaniger and Oleg Reebokov are re-writing. We hope to have it done in a
month or so and we will test it in both languages.

3. MS Office filters are badly broken for both Arabic and Hebrew. TkOS is
fixing almost all of the Issuezilla issues that have been reported
regarding the filters. BTW, most of the filter problems reported in IZ are
from Hebrew users. We are sure that Arabic speakers should be seeing the
same problems but not reporting the bugs.

4. General feature support
The are a lot of general features that OOo does not handle as well as MS
Office yet that are necessary for serious users. Paragraph numbering is
one of the most sensitive. We don't have a good answer to Word Art
and "text effects" also. Calc 2.0 has lists, but these are not nearly as
developed as those in Excel. The document embedding model in OOo is not
nearly as well developed as that in MS Office.

So I stand by my statement that we are a few years behind MS office in
terms of both RTL support and general features although there are some
aspects or RTL support that are better.

> > * 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 are talking about out-of-the-box configuration. It's not acceptable in
our market to force the user to configure the application even once,
especially not after installation. On the first execution of OOo after
installation a new document must open with right alignment, RTL text flow
and a default font that is Hebrew (or Arabic). All of the Hebrew OOo
versions released since 1.1.0 and available on openoffice.org.il have this
default configuration. We will provide the XML installation files on
http://openoffice.org.il for anyone who wants them. I think that they
would be of use for Arabic OOo, since to-date I have not seen an Arabic
OOo that has this out-of-the-box Arabic configuration.

Regards,

 - yba


>
>
> We look forward to reading your finish article ;)
>
> Regards
>

-- 
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