Re: Article on native language project

[M Elzubeir <zubeir at gmail dot com>]

On Thu, 14 Oct 2004 10:14:31 +0200 (IST), Jonathan Ben Avraham
<yba at tkos dot co dot il> wrote:

>
> [..]
>
> 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

Yes.

> 2. Calendar and date format

As with any other localization.

> 3. "Shaping" of Arabic numbers

Hindi numerals don't have shaping (also incorrectly known as Arabic
numerals) does not require or have shaping.

> 4. Installation options such as language and default fonts
> 5. Canned texts such as fax form, resume, memo

Okay, but these are not special -- ie. all languages require this type
of localization and are not necessarily RTL specific.

> 
> 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:

I should note here that in all my dealings with OOo, I have mostly
been using Writer and never had to use any of the other suite
applications -- so it is obvious that I am not fully aware of the
other issues in the rest of the office suite.

> 
> 1. OOo Calc is onlt LTR!
> [..]
>
>
> from Hebrew users. We are sure that Arabic speakers should be seeing the
> same problems but not reporting the bugs.
>

Yes, and that is mainly due to the fact that no commercial entity has
taken up interest in OOo in the Arabic speaking world. In other words,
as far as Arabeyes is concerned, we have quite a few things to worry
about and OOo is only one of them. We don't have enough people with
know-how's to assign to different projects and so our feedback is
generally less than our Hebrew speaking couterparts.

I would imagine that this would change dramatically. The only company
that may have a similar outlook as Tkos in the entire Arab world is
probably Freesoft.jo -- and I am not sure what they have done in this
area.
 
> 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.

I would have to trust you on that one since I don't use either.

> 
> 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.

You may be right that we are behind if we are considering the entire
office suite.

> 
> 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,

I think those configurations can be set in the localized packages
(which I believe is already the case).

> 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.
> 

Jonathan, could you please put those files in a non .il domain? It
seems that our friends here at Etisalat believe that blocking all of
.il would help our productivity. Let's just say, it's not helping (and
going through alternative proxies is just too slow to be tolerable).


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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